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BY 



C. J. 1NGERS0LL. 



PHILADELPHIA: 

T. K. AND P. G. COLLINS, PRINTERS. 

1856. 



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BY 



C. J. INGERSOLL 



PHILADELPHIA: 

T. K. AND P. G. COLLINS, PE INTERS. 
18 56. 



AFRICAN SLAVERY IN AMERICA. 



Now that the Presidential election is over, and pursuant to its 
equally dubious and perilous, but fortunate conclusion, this is the 
time, Pennsylvania is the meridian, and an aged descendant from 
New England, withdrawn from party politics, is not an improper 
person to submit to the whole country of tbese United States 
their temperate but decided philosophy of vindication from fo- 
reign misrepresentation, and intestine disturbance concerning 
slavery ; a task, insensibility to whose difficulties would be in- 
capacity for the patriotic undertaking. To explain satisfactorily 
the most crying and formidable of our national evils is beset 
and hindered by passionate contradictions. Within the last half 
century, the vast influence of England has undergone complete 
revulsion, from approval of much cultivated to aversion of much 
abused slavery, which aversion has been naturalized in parts of 
the United States with virulent intensity. The baneful fanaticism 
of political abolition, endemic in Great Britain, and widely spread >/ 
throughout this country, has become an intractable distemper, 
discarding discussion, disregarding facts, ignoring history, how- 
ever recent and instructive, and substituting shouts of clamorous 
vituperation, drowning argument and reason. While in fifteen 
sovereign States, nearly four millions of negroes, continually and 
rapidly increasing in number, are held in slavery by some eight 
millions of IV passionately, with all the instincts of right 

of property, insisting on that right as inherited, legal, moral, pro- 
Lndispensable, and constitutional, which neither can, must, 
or shall be questioned ; at the same time this their asserted right 
of property is vehemently denied and disputed by other fourteen 
millions of fellow-countrymen, in sixteen other sovereign and 
nearly contiguous States, the whole thirty-one altogether con- 
federated in constitutional union. British influence, with im- 




mense ponderosity, overpowering the established public policy 
and individual morality, not only of their former colonies, but of 
the whole world, denounces slavery as execrable iniquity, defiling 
the very food, if not the clothing it produces. Fuel to feed that 
execration is continually furnished by millions of. not only Eng- 
lish, but other European abolitionists, denouncing American 
slavery as the worst tyranny; many of whom also decry Ameri- 
can democracy, identified with slavery, as the most turbulent, 
rapacious, and dangerous anarchy; and the licentious popular 
insubordination, imputed to the American combination of liberty 
with slavery, as the most lawless and formidable parody of govern- 
ment ever attempted to be imposed on mankind. Wherefore, 
explaining the traditional and vital reality of negro slavery as an 
accomplishment of supreme state necessity renders its vindica- 
tion as a fact apparently its moral justification. 

Without impairing whether it be evil, as most insist, or good, 
as some contend, unquestionably it is a vast, stupendous, and 
vital American reality. In the Middle States, the temperate zone 
of American republican continental union, holding together the 
slave-holding southwest and slave-hating northeast, there should 
and must be considerate and patriotic Americans enough, inde- 
pendent of all foreign influences, neither owning slaves, nor hating 
those who do, even if regretting slavery, willing to accept histo- 
rical, political, and philosophical ascertainment that, whether 
slavery be evil or not, modern external abolition is a much 
greater evil. Vouched by irrefutable English and American 
authority, negro slavery in America may be so vindicated that 
no American need shrink from its communion. Its abrupt, forci- 
ble, or extrinsic removal would bo a tremendous catastrophe. 
Dismembering the United States and destroying the American 
republic would tend not to abolish, but perpetuate slavery. Few 
in this meridian have any practical knowledge of much abused 
slavery. Its English denunciation, adopted by New England, is 
merely remote and theoretical philanthropy, national or sectional 
idice. Such of us as live in Pennsylvania, where for a long 
time there have been no slaves, can be moved by no natural im- 
pulse to defend their ownership. If descended from New England, 
the bias must be otherwise. But every lover of his country 
should desire to vindicate its institutions, of which this is one, 
from foreign detraction and its American adoption. 



Notwithstanding much sciolous speculation concerning slavery, 
its origin, legality, and even questioning its authentic existence, 
yet by overruling Providence men have been slaves of masters 
in all ages and in every country, as attested by all history, sacred 
and profane. Villanage, much more odious bondage than African 
slavery in America, was an English tenure, before negro slavery in 
America became English law, in great favor. Mr. Hallam explains 
how common it was in the ninth and tenth centuries for the English 
to export slaves to be sold in Ireland. But no ancient or Euro- 
pean slavery, Greek or Roman bondage, villanage or serfdom, no 
slavery in any other form, had the motive or justification of 
African slaves, both the trade and tenure, transported from mere 
barbarism, to cultivate in congenial climates, modern luxuries 
become universal necessaries of life. Negro laborers cultivating 
rice, sugar, coffee, und cotton, in tropical regions, where neither 
white labor nor free can be relied upon, is a form of servile labor 
with indigenous and political recommendations peculiar to this 
country. In the beginning of this century, the slave trade in the 
opinion of a large majority of Englishmen, most competent to 
judge, was providential transition from African barbarism to 
civilized emancipation ; and should the anticipations of Liberia 
be realized, or negro national independent community be other- 
wise effected, no greater result of overruling Providence will have 
ever taken place. Even as it is under what may be termed British 
persecution by sword and fire of both the trade and the tenure 
of slavery, there is said to be manifest improvement among the 
slaves of this country, from one generation to another. Mean- 
time, under all the disadvantages of enraged abolition, inesti- 
mable political advantages by means of slavery and its products 
advance continental prosperity, maintain the grandeur of confed- 
erated United States, cheaply vouchsafe almost permanent peace, 
and develop a benign experiment of tranquil republican govern- 
ment. 

The mother country of these United States unanimously and 
sedulously cultivated both the trade and the tenure of African slaves 
in America. By legislation, and treaties, jurisprudence, social 
encouragement, every how, from the first colonial settlement of 
this now extensive empire, the transportation of Africans to be 
made slaves in all its parts, was encouraged and legalized by 
metropolitan superintendence. The year after British liberty, 



which began but one century, 1688, before American, 1775, both 
by revolutions, the attorney and solicitor-general published profes- 
sional opinions, equivalent to laws, that negroes were merchandise 
within the meaning of the navigation act. Acts of Parliament 
in 1733 and 1758, countenanced both the trade and the tenure in 
them as slaves. In 1729 the attorney and solicitor-general Yorke 
and Talbot, both afterwards chancellors, and among England's 
greatest lawyers, gave opinions assuring the colonists who had 
numerous negro slaves in England, that property in them was as 
valid and safe there as in America or the West Indies. The 
Assiento contract is familiar history. 

This attorney-general Yorke, and solicitor-general Talbot, 
great men, as Lord Stowell said Lord Mansfield admitted, great 
men of that age or of any other age, said Lord Stowell on the 
bench, those great lawyers assured the London merchants that 
they were perfectly secure in their legal tenure of slaves. " They 
both pledged themselves to the merchants of London," said Lord 
Stowell, "to save them harmless from all inconvenience on such a 
subject; which pledge was afterwards fully confirmed by a simi- 
lar judgment pronounced in 1740, by Sir Philip Yorke, then 
become Lord Chancellor Hardwicke, sitting in the Court of Chan- 
cery." 

" This judgment," adds Lord Stowell, "so pronounced in full con- 
fidence, and without a doubt, upon a practice which had endured 
universally in the colonies, and (as appears by those opinions) in 
Great Britain, was in not more than twenty-two years afterwards, 
reversed by Lord Mansfield. The personal traffic in slaves resi- 
dent in England had been as public, and as authorized in London 
as in any of our West India Islands. They were sold on the 
Exchange, and other places of public resort, by parties themselves 
resident in London, and with as little reserve as they would have 
been in any of our West India possessions. Such a state of 
things continued without impeachment, from a very early period 
up to nearly the end of the last century." 

But in 1772, three years before the American revolution, the 
English Chief Justice Mansfield, unexpectedly gave the negro 
slave Somerset the benefit of habeas corpus act, to prevent his 
master sending him back in fetters to Jamaica, to be sold as a 
slave. It is difficult from another eminent English judge, Lord 
Stowell's, sarcastic dissection of what he termed Lord Mansfield's 



speech on the bench, to ascertain its judicial result : nothing more 
than mere suspension of slavery in England, Lord Stowell says. 
And as to the air of England being too pure for slaves to breathe, 
how did the villains manage to respire, his lordship contemptu- 
ously asks, during the several centuries of their slavery? By 
what Lord Mansfield faintly articulated as legal policy, after 
much hesitation and great doubt, disregarding, as he said, all the 
precedents, and looking only to what lie called municipal policy 
of law, he decreed, without, as far as appears, the concurrence of 
the other judges, that the negro should not be sent manacled to 
Jamaica. Still, he said a contract for the sale of a slave might be 
enforced in an English court of justice, and sales of slaves in 
open market in London were as legal as sales of cattle in Smith- 
field Market. Blackstone, who is said to have declined while at 
the bar, to give an opinion against slavery, vaunting in a subse- 
quent edition of his commentaries (citing a prior case which does 
not sustain the vaunt), that as soon as a slave lands in England 
he becomes free, dispels the bubble by adding that the master's 
right to the slave's service may possibly continue. 

All nations, however enslaved, boast their freedom. In Louis 
the Fourteenth's age, when every Frenchman might be imprisoned 
for life, as his brother was understood to be, by the king's order, 
and kept in an iron mask till he died, an ordinance forbade negro 
slavery. Lord Mansfield ruled the press gang to be common 
law in England, without which even Lord Chatham declared that 
it is impossible to equip a fleet in time. Yet long after Mans- 
field's flourish in Somerset's case, it was announced as common 
law by an American judge. Spurning the federal constitution, 
which should have been his supreme law, that disloyal magis- 
trate, intoxicated with more than flagrant abolition, extrajudi- 
cially blurted that outside the compact the principle sprung fresh and 
perfect and beautiful from the mind of Lord Mansfield ; not only 
so, but, like Minerva from Jove, it worked the miracle of endow- 
ing slaves with sanctity of reason, an exploit of this judge's notion 
of common law which seems to have bereft him of common 
sense. In 1772, by revolution of legal policy, an English judge 
broached what, in 1S27, another eminent English judge almost 
contemptuously sentenced as contrary to common law, interna- 
tional law, and the rights of property. Still, such might be legal 
policy where no African slaves were or could be. But where 



they abounded, and were legalized by all the codes and the comity 
of many confederate sovereignties, an American judge, by much 
more egregious judicial legislation, interpolated extrajudicially 
his crude notion of legal policy as American common law. Com- 
mon law, never mentioned by Mansfield, must be venerable in 
order to be valid, recondite and imperceptible in permeation of 
obvious justice, growing like the oak, not forced in political hot- 
bed to rotten ripeness, or by sickly sentimentality watered to ma- 
turity. The judiciary is bound to maintain property in slaves 
like all other, till legislative enactment abolishes or reforms it. 
To pronounce abolition common American law, because a judge 
pronounced it municipal law r in England, was not mere judicial 
but licentious usurpation ; such legislation as passionate judges 
sometimes enact. 

Lord Mansfield, a leading politician, was remarkable for many 
strokes of judicial policy, which it would have been more becom- 
ing to leave to act of Parliament, instead of judicial usurpation. 
American state judges cannot ape a worse political example. 

English law, legislation, and public opinion concerning slavery, 
are exhibited with much ability by Lord Stowell in his dissection 
of Lord Mansfield's rhetorical declaration of independence of 
them all, by sudden revulsion which from Old England tra . 
to New, to mislead the latter after the former into the deplorable 
palinodes of modern abolition. Slavery planted and cultivated 1 >y 
England throughout the United States, trade, tenure, and all, was 
as general a favorite in both countries as abolition of it has become. 
Till the latter end of the last century it was more firmly seated in 
English regard than the reigning royal family. Soon after Mans- 
field's judicial stroke of state, when it was universal, and by any 
abrupt action indestructible throughout the American colonies, 
their independence united democracy with slavery, both together 
and equally indispensable to American republican sovereignty. 
English enemies much more of democracy than slavery, aposta- 
tized from tolerance to abuse and increasing dislike of the latter; 
which ethical revolution revealed slavery to be not only impoli- 
tic, but iniquitous. Legal legerdemain converted one slave into 
a sort of local temporary freeman. Raw and harsh climate 
dered numerous slaves as impossible as lions, elephants or mos- 
quitoes. Wherefore it was as good legal policy to free a ne 
to impress a seaman. On more zealous examination of the Bible, 



English Humanitarians discovered that slavery is forbid where it 
abounds in every page. Soon they came to insist, contrary to all 
the law, policy, and property they had established in America, 
that not a solitary one or few, but near a million, fast increasing 
to three or four millions of slaves, must be turned loose there. 
to plunge into licentious and pernicious idleness, mischief, and 
crime. In England nothing could be easier than such philan- 
thropy, whether legal or not. In America it was as impossible 
as to root out the virgin forests at one blow. But English climal e 
abolishes all odoriferous as well as odious distinction between 
black and white, and every Briton, especially if liberal or radical, 
cannot understand why masters declaring their independence do 
not embrace their slaves. 

Wherefore Paine, whose opportune pamphlet on politics was 
as felicitous as his subsequent infidel tract was abominable, 
was the first mandatory of European abolitionists, to physic this 
country with foreign poison, curative perhaps in judicious doses, 
but fatal otherwise. The first proceeding in the single branched 
Legislature of Pennsylvania, after he was chosen clerk in Novem- 
ber, 1779, was a motion for the act of March, 1780, which was the 
first attempt by legislation to abolish slavery, then an institution 
familiar throughout the United States. 

One of the many perversions boiling of late from the Boston 
caldron of scalding abolition, is that Massachusetts was never or 
not then a slave State. According to authenticated exposition 
of that subject in the Massachusetts judicial courts, negro slavery 
was a cruel and costly luxury there, long after the United States 
Declaration of Independence; and long after declarations of 
independence by the slave-holding States of North Carolina and 
Virginia, claimed by them to have preceded the United States 
declaration in Pennsylvania. The harsh climate of the old Bay 
State reduced the frost-bitten and half-perished negroes there, to 
mere pauperism, only fit for the almshouse, and without masters 
burdens on the township poor taxes. A miserable cripple of a 
negro slave, named London, was so dear a help that by judicial state- 
ment he was sold no less than eleven times in ten years, in Massa- 
chusetts, so that Lord Mansfield's convenient doctrine of legal 
policy was dictated by cold weather to Massachusetts justice, to get 
rid of negro incumbrances, much worse than useless as property. 
But Yirginia and North Carolina, having, as the slave-holding 



10 

States always have done, in the leading annunciation of free prin- 
ciples, adopted and published written constitutions in 1776, with 
bills of rights, and the other cardinal safeguards of free government ; 
six years afterwards Massachusetts followed their example, and 
copied their bill of rights, adopting from that of Virginia the inno- 
cent preface that all men are free and equal. Seizing on that phrase, 
the judiciary of Massachusetts construed it to embrace perishing 
negro slaves, when not only Virginia never dreamt of such 'an 
interpretation, but the highest judicial tribunal of Pennsylvania, 
after solemn argument by the ablest lawyers, and on great delib- 
eration, likewise resolved that negro slaves are not within the 
. clause. 

Massachusetts adroitly made a virtue of necessity, with no 
regard whatever to either liberty or humanity, and constructively 
consigned to the almshouses, the few cripples adjudged equal in 
freedom to healthy freemen ; as Franklin in Pennsylvania parted 
with his negro slaves, because he found them unprofitable 
property to hold. 

/ While legal policy constructively freed slaves in England and 
Massachusetts, a solemn and excellent act of legislation for that 
purpose, duly introduced abolition in Pennsylvania, disturbing 
no vested right of property in slaves, but on the contrary, pro- 
tecting it from injury by the most conservative provisions. The 
act of 1780 for the gradual abolition of slavery in Pennsylvania, 
is a monument of what all abolition ought to be, and was till 
marplots put an end to it. No living slave was liberated by that 
act, nor the children of slaves, till twenty eight-years after their 
birth; by which time, 1808, climate and economy would by 
spontaneous liberation have rendered legislation superfluous. 
Abolition by that act of Assembly was to begin when slave trade 
I was stopped by the subsequent federal constitution, in 1808. 

A most signal merit of the Pennsylvania act was its patriotic 
--nationality, its sacred regard for the United States, then only con- 
federated. Twenty-three members of the assembly journalized 
by strong protest their insuperable aversion to any abolition that 
might, by any resilient possibility, prove detrimental to their 
slave-holding countrymen of the Southern States, or excite the 
negroes themselves anywhere to undue hopes of equality with 
white freemen. The last and most formidable blow of British 
invasion was then uplifted and about to fall on the Carolinas and 



11 

Georgia. Bound to them by no more than a loose confederation, 
■with not one word of slavery in it, the faithful representatives of 
Pennsylvania, nevertheless, without objection to prospective and 
conservative abolition, yet strenuously protested against the 
slightest risk of that continental speciality, which, uniting slavery 
with liberty, was the bulwark by union of American independ- 
ence. Although the abolition act of 1780 expressly avouched 
the State comity by which fugitive slaves were subjected to ex- 
tradition, and expressly negatived the legal policy of England 
and of Massachusetts, construing their judicial emancipation ; 
nevertheless a large minority deprecated what might possibly 
injure the Union. 

A Pennsylvania legislative resolution of 1819 is erroneously 
supposed to harmonize with the abolition act of 1780; than which 
mistake nothing can be further from true history. When the 
reception of Missouri by the United States was made the first occa- 
sion for preventing the diffusion of slavery, Jefferson, Madison and 
Clay, earnest and among the only practical abolitionists, depre- 
cated that disturbance of the Union. But naturalized Americans, N 
not distinguishing between white and black, and insisting on 
freedom for both alike, like Paine, CTConnell and others, insensi- 
ble to the American speciality of composite republicanism, post- 
pone the Union and its vast development to a European theoretic 
sentimentality, there at least practicable, but here incompatible 
with our institutions. A resolution, therefore, presented to the 
legislature by a naturalized Irishman, Mr. William J. Duane, and 
seconded by a naturalized Englishman, Mr. Thackara, assumed, 
first the English dogma, that slavery being odious pollution, and 
stain, and cruelty, &c., of all of which those respectable gentlemen 
had no practical knowledge, nor any other than English ecpially 
ignorant assumption of it all, thereupon assumed further the consti- 
tutional right and policy of prohibiting its diffusion from one part 
of the United States to another. On that doublet of assumed pos- 
tulates, an eloquent preamble and resolutions being constructed, 
calling on Pennsylvania members of Congress to vote against 
the admission of any territory in which slavery is not prohibited, 
one of those currents of legislative unanimity on certain subjects 
familiar to all members of such assemblies, unanimously voted 
for universal freedom. The abolition act of 1780 had done no 



12 

such thing. Its emotions were those of American not European 
liberty. As Hamlet shouts on Ophelia's grave — 

" Forty thousand Britons [or other foreigners] 
Cannot, with all their quantity of love, 
Make up our sum ;" 

the sum of those born on American soil, who, if slavery be one 
of its infirmities, sympathize with it like a fond child in a 
parent's weakness. When Washington, Jefferson, and Hamilton 
united to break Franklin's first treat}-, which greatly succoured, 
if it did not secure independence, resolving on its sacrifice by a 
proclamation of neutrality, they struck for their country, right or 
wrong. Their wise and lofty patriotism, afterwards put into a 
Avar toast, attributed to Decatur was supreme loyalty, which even 
if slavery be a necessary evil, upholds the country with it as 
in war, against foreign aggressive interference with a national 
institution. It is utter mistake to consider the Pennsylvania 
resolutions of 1819, consonant with the abolition act of 1780. 
Then the direst jeopardy of all the United States called nation- 
ality to predominate and save struggling independence from 
iiiiminentsubjugation. Certainly not one of the patriotic minority, 
probably few if any of the majority of 1780, would have voted for 
the resolutions of 1811), the capitulation of somnolent love of , 
repose in a period of profound public quiet, when foreign did 
tion of intemperate abolition prevailed over patriotism, and an 
■ lent shout for freedom, black or white, overruling union was 
rally irresistibl •. 

Abolition was inaugurated by law enacted by slave-holders 
generously careful of the vested rights of other and more in- 
led slave-holders. Subsequent abolition b and from 
remote old English and distant New England sentimentalists 
having no slaves, no climate or products for their employment, 
no privity with or knowledge of their operations or situation, is 
mere spurious philanthropy, as futile and preposterous as any 
other ignorant, national, sectional or local theoretical prejudi 
or fanatical antipathy; the same as E or Araeric 
repugnance to polygamy or the Koran in Turkey, to infanticide, 
fetichis o, or casteism in China or India. 

British invasion of the Southern States closing with inde] 
ence achieved by the catastr >] rktown, Cornwallis's sur- 



1o 
O 

render left nothing to do but its acknowledgment, which soon 
followed at Paris. The treaty of that Congress is well known. But 
the grandeur of the mere event has overshadowed the magnificent 
frontispiece by which it illustrates and sanctifies American compo- 
site sovereignty, constituted of liberty and slavery. The three 
greatest powers of the world, France, Great Britain and Spain, 
met the United States in Congress at Paris, the metropolis of Eu- 
rope. The th^ee American ministers, all northern men, from Penn- 
sylvania, Massachusetts and New York, no southern slave-holder 
among them ; two of them, President Adams and Chief Justiee 
Jay, great lawyers, the third the reigning monarch of practical 
common sense and popular mother wit, decided with concurrence 
of England, France and Spain, as the law of Christendom, that 
slavery is an American national institution. While publicists* 
and legists give out that it is too odious and unnatural to origi- 
nate but by the positive enactment of local law, those great ex- 
pounders of jurisprudence and teachers of philosophy, by their 
work of supreme, historical and conclusive authority, transcend- 
ing technical treatises, Mansfield's speech, Blackstone's boast, 
and Massachusetts constructive judgments, lay down the highest 
law by a cardinal treaty that American negro slaves were sur- 
rendered as property (such are the words) not to individual owners 
or separate States, but to the thirteen United States as a nation./ 
Old Franklin, in his pride of triumph, wearing the same suit in 
which he underwent Yf edderburne's brutal onslaught in the 
British privy council ; John Adams in his sturdy uncompromising- 
patriotism, and John Jay in his conscientious self-possession ; 
these dictators of American independence would not take it with- 
out as full and explicit recognition of American slavery as 
American liberty. The slave property was surrendered not to 
any man or any State, but to the said United States, naming the 
old thirteen, with whom peace was declared in the name of the 
holy and undivided Trinity. Virginia and Massachusetts got 
nothing as such. The surrender was to the nation of which they 
were parts. The negroes came with the lands and houses, as * 
national property to a nation of forefathers, some of whose de- 
scendants now in pulpits, on forums, in senates, and courts of 
justice, reversing the sacrament of American sovereign independ- 
ence, contend that whereas American liberty is national, yet 
American slaverv is sectional, with none but local odious origin, 



u 

if any legal origin at all. Such is the revolution of sentimental 
abolition, which, since the beginning of this century, denies all 
the laws and all the recognitions of preceding ages. 

In this cursory historical and chronological refutation of 
English and new English abolition, a few years later comes the 
federal constitution, with negro slavery in its marrow, bones, and 
all : representation the spine, and direct taxation the blood of a 
body politic, which we are told these vital organs do not gene- 
ralize ; after a mere formal article of basis, put forward in the 
very second. The extraditionary clause concerning fugitive 
slaves, now so furiously denounced and bloodily rebelled against, 
was added unanimously, as mere complement, without a single 
word on the subject in convention, as not only the indispensable 
handmaid of the rest, but considerably softened from the same pro- 
vision enacted by the Pennsylvania abolition act, and enforced with- 
out any written law by common State comity. An Irish gentle- 
man, delegate from South Carolina, but denizen of Pennsylvania, 
where he long lived and is buried, Major Butler, moved it ; and 
the Pennsylvania delegation were much gratified to see their own 
State provision thus nationalized. Of many nativities, they re- 
presented all Great Britain and North America: an Englishman, 
an Irishman, a Scotchman, a New Yorker, two New England 
men, with only two Pennsylvania born, one of Quaker family, 
but altogether gratified in the central position of this State to 
find northern commerce and southern negro property so easily 
and harmoniously joined in that union of slavery with demo- 
cracy, inconceivable and formidable, wherefore hateful in Europe, 
but the slavery not more than the democracy, or more vituperated. 

Though the generous donation by Virginia of the Nortlnve>t<in 
Territory, simultaneous with the Constitution, interdicted slavery 
where excluded by climate, yet the extraditionary precaution 
against fugitive slaves was inserted by Nathan Dane, of Massa- 
chusetts, after being omitted in Jefferson's draft of the act of 
Congress; the whole ordinance declared by Madison, though 
proceeding from the best intention, with no shadow of authority. 

Soon after followed those valuable corporations, the early 
abolition societies, with Franklin, moribund and incapable of 
action, head of the one, and Jay of the other. Just men, as they 
both were, lovers of law and order and the Tnion, they would have 
condemned as strongly the robbery or enticement of a slave from 



Ik 



15 

liis master, as they would any other malefaction. A member of 
the abolition society, especially of the Society of Friends, head- 
ing a gang of infuriated negroes, like Italian highwaymen, in 
broad daylight, on the highway to rob a gentleman of his slaves 
as he passed peaceably along, would have shocked such aboli- 
tionists as Franklin and Jay. To have pleaded the principles of 
abolition societies for such Lynch law, they would have pronounced 
monstrous perversion. Consisting of the most respectable indi- 
viduals, foreign as well as American, of the Southern as of the 
Northern States, those societies were chartered expressly for the 
improvement of the negro race — not to steal, secrete, or madden 
negroes by homicidal hatred put in their hearts, deadly weapons 
in their hands, or even crotchets in their heads against white 
fellow countrymen, nearly all always disposed to treat the negroes 
with all the kindness compatible with incongruity of race and 
peculiarity of position ; to treat them much more kindly than 
Jews are treated in many of the most refined countries of Europe, 
than Irish by English, Italians by Austrians, Poles by Russians, 
or Scotch peasants by duchesses, whose hovels and food till their 
cruel expulsion from^he hard homes they delighted in to make • 
sheep pastures — whose hovels and food were less comfortable or 
wholesome than those of negroes' dogs. 

In some called free States, the difficulty is not slavery, but 
skin. While free negroes are excluded as nuisances from several 
of these States, they are not only allowed in others, but allowed 
nearly all but civic and social rights, to which they cannot be 
received, while nearly all whites recoil with horror from their ^ 
cohabitation. For a white woman to marry a black man excludes 
her from society. For a white man to marry a black woman is a 
crime against nature, like sodomy or incest. Nor can any humane 
or sensible person of either sex visit one of the suburbs of Phila- 
delphia, without regretting that many free negroes there are not 
slaves. Disgusting filth, sloth, habitual vices, frequent crimes, 
if generated by English theorists suborning theoretical Americans, 
all far from and ignorant of the domestic slavery they strive to 
break up, are deplorable effects of pernicious infatuation, more 
so to black slaves than white free men. For such outcasts masters 
would be invaluable guardians, and freedom is great misfortune. 

Perfectly protected by equal laws in person and property, there 
is nothing in the non-slaveholding States to prevent negroes be- 



16 

coming as rich and influential as the Eothschilcls in Germany and 
England. But while mere abolition is most commonly the road 
to ruin, encouraging fugitive slaves or other negroes to ferocious 

Qguinary resistance of their fate is provoking their destruc- 
tion. Before these saturnalia their condition was much more 

table than now. Wealthy and well considered people of 
color were common. 

Deeply rooted in the American soil by a mother country, trans- 
ferred by her to the United States on their coming to independent 
sovereignty, incorporated by them with their federal constitution, 
but with philanthropic plans for its reform or abolition if an evil, 
negro slavery, just like the various soils and climates of the country, 
part of the American inheritance from England, was recognized 
with unanimous patriotism and exulting nationality as one of the 
institutions of a new republic destined to develop an experiment of 
representative democracy by greater liberty than was ever ventured 
or even conceived before. Kentucky and Tennessee, slave terri- 
tories, ceded to the Union, were received into it by acts of Con- 
gress approved by President Washington, with express provision 
that Congress should make no regulation even tending to eman- 
cipate slaves. The act of 1793 for enforcing the constitutional 
clause concerning fugitives, passed by Congress without hesita- 
tion, the States of Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, and 
II' >rida ; in short, without overloading this statement of American 

-ion to English slavery beyond all necessity of argument, 
with historical attestations of the highest authority for the tran- 
quil contentment of all the people of all the States, with the 
indispensable and inevitable combination of black slavery with 

liberty, it may be said that the American republic went on 
its way rejoicing in both. Whether it was right or wrong was 
no more questionable than whether the climate was pleasant or 
the soil fruitful. There slavery was; and though enthusiastic 

ionists like Jefferson flattered themselves that slavery might 

dished or reformed, yet no distant, ignorant, or mere senti- 
mentalists undertook precipitately to spoil benevolence. 

As the eighteenth century closed with Jefferson's succession to 

i v, human foresight could not anticipate, nor the 

most romantic imagination conceive, the revulsion by which, in 

the first quarter of the nineteenth, England was to disturb the 

four corners of the globe with sudden revolution in ethics. Slave 



17 

trade and tenure were in full acceptance. Climate and economy 
were inculcating the superior cheapness of white labor in tem- 
perate regious. 

Still, when I was at Princeton College in 1796, 7, and 8, Jersey 
farms were tilled by negro slaves; and when I was at Liverpool, 
in 1802, I saw the slave-ships in that port, large, roomy, well- 
ventilated, fine vessels, fitted for the suitable accommodation of 
negro passengers, as packets and ocean steamers now are for 
others, and in comparatively as much preference. 

But referring to English abolition, just as modern abolitionists 
do to American slaver} 7 , that is, without practical or any other 
knowledge of it than reading affords, and aware that slavery, 
though always in legal existence and allowance, was nevertheless 
an equivocal state of property, which many publicists questioned, 
it was natural that, in the course of human events, abolition of 
slavery should occur to freemen in England with colonial slaves, 
as it had before been recognized by kings in France, republicans 
in Holland, and judges in Scotland, while torture was applied 
there to extort confessions from prisoners. All these authorities 
were cited in Somerset's case, and England abounded in well dis- 
posed visionaries, together with radical reformers. Many bene- 
volent men are abolitionists. Most of our southern slave-holders, 
were so, with Jefferson at their head, and Washington and Madison 
well inclined. Abolition of war has long been attempted. 
Franklin, Jefferson, Lords Aberdeen and Ashburton were of that 
class of abolitionists. Abolition of taxation, or certain kinds of 
it; abolition of inebriety and other vices; abolition of certain kinds 
of government; numbers of mankind are abolitionists. And those 
who undertook to abolish slavery, were induced to it in England 
by there being no slaves there, but only in distant colonies, which )\ 
Parliament might rule as it would, by the alleged barbarities of 
English colonial slave-holders, and by that pragmaticalness which 
is part of the insular nature of a great nation, more so inclined, 
as their own historian Clarendon long ago deplored, than any 
other people. 

Wilberforce, the Methodists, and other sincere philanthropists, 
who began the attempt by holding a balance of party power, 
subdued the rival leaders, Fox and Pitt, into support of abolition. 
Still they were, like Franklin and Jefferson, rational, temperate, 
and prospective in their scheme for gradual abolition. Seizing, 
2 



18 

nevertheless, on the helpless colony of distant Jamaica, omnipotent 
Parliament could experiment there as physicians do, kill or cure, 
with poisons tried on dogs and cats. That fine colony might 
expostulate, but must submit. Nearly all the sober good sense 
of Great Britain was against abolition, though no one supposed it 
would prove so ruinous as it did; and the English treatment of 
negro slaves was so much severer than the American, as to fur- 
nish the abolitionists with a powerful argument by the cruelties 
of the tenure requiring the trade to replenish victims. Yet the 
real, the conservative abolitionists, before they were supplanted, 
and their cause ruined by wild zealots, had the stone of Sisyphus 
to roll up, year after year, from 1785, when the first petition was 
faintly presented from an obscure place to Parliament, for more 
than fifty years, till 1834, their stone was tumbled down upon 
them, and the prospect of rational, forbearing, conservative aboli- 
tion was extremely unpromising. Buxton's resolutions in the 
Commons, for prompt though not precipitate abolition, in 1838, 
were superseded by Canning's ministerial amendment for further 
postponement, inquiry, and ascertainment, until at last, yielding 
to what Lord Derby said must be submitted to as public senti- 
ment, in one of those surging currents of legislation which occa- 
sionally overflow any assembly, but gilding surrender with enor- 
mous atonement by a hundred millions of dollars, Parliament 
enacted the absurd futilities of turning the Jamaica negroes into 
apprentices and soldiers for several years, to educate and prepare 
them, as Franklin advised, for emancipation. On the first day 
of August, 1834, what was acclaimed as the African Magua 
Charta, became a British law: condemned by much of the good 
sense of England; and King William the Fourth, who put his 
royal signature to that infatuation, told the American minister, 
with a sneer at such cruel stupidity of reform, that as a peer he 
had always voted against abolition. 

Just then, with Wilberforce's death, a new race of rabid aboli- 
tionists arose to run their career of riot, revelling in the ruin of 
the most productive British American colony, propagating and 
crusading against slavery all over the world, with the immense 
maritime potentiality of Great Britain. The Irish agitator O'Con- 
nel, like the infidel Tom Paine, a violent abolitionist, soon after 
the beginning of Queen Victoria's reign, at a public meeting in 
Manchester, stigmatized the United States for sending a Virginia 



19 

slave-breeder as their minister to England, declaring that any 
Briton would pollute his palm by shaking hands with an / 
American. About that epoch Great Britain revolutionized her 
whole ethical system. British abolition, once if not rational, at 
all events a temperate and cautious essay, with the parliamentary 
ruin of Jamaica, broke out in reckless rage. Roman extermina- 
tion of the first Christians, the Christian crusades, the blood- 
thirsty Inquisition, and other outbursts of national madness, 
which history depicts but cannot account for, were not more 
fierce, violent, or foolish than British abolition became, first of the 
trade, then the tenure of slaves. The American transition from 
colonial to independent condition was by no means so total a re- 
volution of sentiment. Lord Stowell, in his dissection of Lord 
Mansfield's speech, cauterizes this British apostasy with classical 
severity. Like the Romans after Pompey's overthrow, the Eng- 
lish people, he says, citing a fine Latin illustration, became 
quite another people. All mankind were to be compelled to 
change as England did. By treaties, laws, fleets, force, largesses, 
and dictatorial importunity, the cotton, coffee, sugar, and rice- 
growing American countries were to renounce their livelihood. 

At the Congress of Vienna, in 1814, Castlereagh got the slave / 
trade denounced: Judge Story, in one of his extravagant 
adjudications, decreeing that to be the law of nations, which 
enormous contradiction of all history Chief Justice Marshall and 
the Supreme Court of course overruled. That incredible exagge- 
ration or distortion by an American judge of English abolition 
occurred while he was in constant correspondence with Lord 
Stowell, who sent him his decree against it in the case of the slave 
Grace, which Judge Story wrote to Lord Stowell he entirely / 
concurred in. A very learned and patriotic magistrate while at 
"Washington, Judge Story could hardly help some sympathetic 
emotions with the abolitionists when at Cambridge, so near their 
Boston head-quarters. 

At the Congress of Ghent, sitting simultaneously with that of 
Vienna, towards the close of the negotiation the American minis- 
ters proposed an article stipulating that Indians with their horri- 
ble hostilities should not be engaged by either party. That ex- 
cellent enforcement of the wisest crying humanity was rejected by 
the British ministers, without a word, who in its stead substituted the 
concluding clause in the treaty of Ghent, that the United States 



\ 



20 

should not only suppress, but join Great Britain in suppressing the 
^ • slave-trade. As Great Britain had for more than a century rejected 
the many entreaties of the United States for that purpose, putting 
their propagand apostasy on them by treaty was almost insulting, 
and certainly strange imposition. Some years later, after they had 
been compelled by umpirage of the Emperor of Russia, to pay for 
negro slaves stolen from the United States by their officers during 
the war of 1812, the Ashburton Washington treaty superadded 
that the United States should keep a squadron at an expense of 
near a million a year on the unhealthy coast of Africa, with the 
British squadron there; waiving moreover the long cherished, 
bravely and hardly maintained American resistance to what 
Britain enforced as the right, but Americans repel as wrong, of sea 
search, since abandoned by England. 

Mr. Calhoun moved, and the Senate voted unanimously, reso- 
lutions against the British violation of all sea law and national 
comity in the case of some American slaves on board a vessel 
called the Creole. After easily cajoling Secretary Webster to 
overlook that insulting wrong (as since acknowledged in Londou 
by umpirage under the last treaty, which makes compensation 
for that latrocinious outrage), that amiable old gentleman Lord 
Ashburton, almost an American denizen, who might have re- 
el American institutions, even though deemed regret- 
table, could not take leave without letting fly a Parthian arrow 
al slavery at his farewell dinner in New York. Eox, the British 
minister here when Lord Ashburton came on his special embassy, 
interposed with extremely impertinent admonition in the affair 
of the Spanish slaves on board the Spanish vessel the Amistad, 
in our waters — the sound washing the shores of Connecticut, And 
this year (1856) it appears by publication in the Brazil newspa- 
rs, the British minister at Rio Janeiro has, with most offensive 
insolence, lectured that government against slavery. Brazil, Spain, 
_al, nations whom Great Britain could overawe, have been 
1 or bribed into capitulations of the slaves found indispen- 
sable for their sugar and coffee plantations. "With overwhelming 
maritime power, the thirty millions of mighty islanders wh • 
round the world a squadron of steam vessels, and subdued three 
hundred millions of Chinese into English license to intoxicate 
them with opium, duty free, having cowed Spain, Portugal, and 
Brazil, -persuaded France to co-operate in the English universal 



21 

propagand against negro slavery everywhere, and that slavery alone 
anywhere. At length by clandestine machinations in Texas 
and Mexico, English abolition ran foul of a nation which had twice 
worsted them, once for free taxation, a second time for free trade, 
and might be provoked to try it a third time, even for negro slavery. 
On another occasion I may endeavor to make known the curi- 
ous history of the Texas controversy and Mexican war caused by 
European, English, and French combined, intermeddling with 
American negro slavery, and the cotton supremacy. Suborned 
by Old England to disloyal extremities, then (1844) as in 1812, 
allowing their passions and prejudices to get the better of their 
interest and reason, the same portion of New England, now rabid 
with abortive abolition, was in 1844 as in 1812, by the slave- 
holding and central States constrained to submit to results prosper- 
ous for their interest in commerce and manufactures, mortifying 
for their disappointed passions. This cursory tract would not 
hold a complete narrative of abolition, annexation, foreign in- 
trigue, intestine commotion, and after all, as in the war of 1812, 
glorious consummation. It was necessary to be in Washington 
in position near enough to scan close at hand the contrivances 
which from London, Paris, Boston, Galveston, and the city of 
Mexico, were employed to frustrate spontaneous annexation of 
kindred peoples, and compel both of them to abdicate the owner- 
ship of negro slaves inherited by French co-operation from Eng- 
lish ancestors, together with their brave spirit of lucrative inde- 
pendence—love of property, our Anglo-Saxon twin sister of the 
love of liberty. In 1814-15, a rough slave-holder triumphed at 
the head of a small force of volunteer slave-holders, not an aboli- 
tionist among them, but their entrenchments constructed and 
wants supplied by negro slaves, and some of their best troops free 
negroes. As Chateaubriand styled all France a soldier, so Ken- 
tucky and Tennessee, then border slave States, were one and all 
soldiers, volunteering to rush in mass a thousand miles to fight 
the vanquishers of dethroned Napoleon, whose contumelious and 
official nickname for border ruffian was Kentuckian, by which 
they stigmatized the slouching, shabb}', gasconading, gigantic, 
high-spirited gunmen, as Jackson termed the gallant slave-holders 
of that region and conjuncture, who, snatching the Union from 
dismemberment, saved Massachusetts from the hostile occupation it 
was passively undergoing. Like that heroic fugleman of the west, 



22 

many of his rough and hardy followers lived in log huts, fed out 
of iron spoons, had no fine furniture or clothes, no drawing- 
rooms, water-closets, privies on their half-cleared premises, if 
even pocket handkerchiefs for some of their secretions. Their 
wives and daughters often garrisoned block-houses. Their 
mothers had handled rifles more expertly than modern abolition 
clergymen. 

In tending school or shop, those grotesque and uncouth 
pioneers, corn-fed and tobacco-scented, indefatigably rolling the 
vast tide of prodigious settlements from the Atlantic to the 
Pacific, were excelled and flouted by more refined foreign enemies 
and squeamish fellow countrymen as Kentuckians, by which term 
of contemptuous aversion all western frontiermen were then 
synonymized as border ruffians. But for manhood, probity, 
honor, enterprise, hardihood, those ultramontane patriots, the 
genus of which Clay and Jackson were the beau ideal, would 
compare not disadvantageously with their revilers. Of that 
genus General Taylor was another specimen. Seen once, before 
he had any idea that he ever would be resident there, knocking 
at the door of the presidential mansion, and no one coming to 
open it, a passer-by told the simple slave-holding soldier to pull 
the bell, of which urbane contrivance he had formed no con- 
ception in his campaign life of woods and prairies. 

Negro slavery and land robber}^, for which the English subju- 
gators of India, and French of Algeria, combined to indict the 
[Jnited States, elicited a conflict in 1843-4, in which rampant 
abolition performed an imposing part. Vehemently seconding 
the foreign powers in*their machinations to prevent the annexa- 
tion of Texas and abolish slavery by one and the same blow, 
northeastern aversion to southwestern slave-holding aggrandize- 
ment confirmed slavery by spontaneous reaction, and secured 
Texas for the Union. One State already five hundred thousand 
people strong, together with three pastoral free States inpartibus, 
California, with Italian climate and inexhaustible gold mines; New 
Mexico, by no meaus so valueless as was reported by Mr. Webster 
and other opponents of the war, to which England and France 
.1 jed Mexico: — Result like that of the war of 1812 for the 
[Jnited States, was the reaction by which that ill-advised effort 
of Old and New England was totally discomfited. 

The puritan Scots Secretary of Foreign Affairs in England, Lord 



23 

Aberdeen was in full communion with the puritan prime minister, 
of France, M. Guizot; in perfect concert as his lordship told 
Ashbel Smith, the judicious and wary minister of Texas in Lon- 
don. As Kossuth taught the word, they were in solidarity to 
abolish slavery, frustrate annexation, deprive the United States 
of the monopoly of cotton, and, as Guizot furthermore suggested, 
for the creation of an American balance of power, by which Mexico 
was to counterpoise the United States, like Portugal or Hanover 
counterpoising Great Britain or France. For those purposes, the 
diplomatic arrangements were — Mr. Eichard Pakenham, a grave, 
not very capable Irishman, nephew of the Duke of Wellington, 
whose nepotism had planted him to vegetate for fourteen years as 
British Charge* dAffaires in Mexico, whence with all his know- 
ledge of the Spanish Indian politics of that country he was trans- 
planted to Washington. Mr. Bankhead, who had been resident 
English minister at Washington, and married there, was fetched all 
the way from Constantinople to Mexico. Charles Elliott, a dash- 
ing captain of the British navy, who had accompanied the inva- 
sion of China, with his notorious white hat and free and easy 
manners, was stationed at Galveston as an excellent manager of 
president Sam. Houston, in whose convivial hilarious intimacy the 
gallant captain might entrench himself. The French ministers at 
Mexico, Alleye de Cypres, and in Texas, Saligny, were in perfect 
communion with the British there and at Washington. 

At Washington there was a club, brotherhood, or conspiracy of 
interloping European diplomats. Bodisco, the queer old good 
hearted representative of the tremendous Emperor Nicholas's awful 
aversion to territorial aggrandizement and slavery; Webster's vic- 
tim Hulseman of the Austrian Emperor's just as earnest desire that 
all men should always be free and equal; the stirring little native 
American French minister Pageot, ashamed of his republican^ 
American birth, and longing from loyal Orleanist to fuse as royal^ 
Bourbonist; the good natured Spaniard Calderon cle la Barca, more 
anxious for Cuba than Texas, but conspiring with all the rest of 
the corps diplomatique to second Pakenham's plans. All these 
faithful representatives of emperors, kings, queens, and royal- 
ties, where liberty and equality were unknown except to be )> 
dreaded and abominated, formed a solid phalanx of champions of 
freedom, to whom abolition of slavery was the first wish of their 
royal masters' generous unsophisticated hearts, and preventing the 



24 

United States getting conterminous territory in Texas, with com- 
plete monopoly of cotton, a consummation devoutly to be frus- 
trated. 

Mr. Adams, with Joshua Giddings and a score more abolition- 
ists in Congress, by inflammatory invocations to unfrocked clergy 
and unsexed women, called loudly for what were accordingly 
poured in as petitions, a pile of which so high that he could 
hardly be seen behind it, Mr. Adams paraded on his desk, with 
the name of a fugitive slave first petitioner at the top of the 
pyramid. More English whig than American republican, Mr. 
Adams luffed his way for the championship of what he most 
mistakingly bolstered as the right of petition — right vital in 
England, but insignificant in this country, where a sov 
people are empowered to instruct their trustees in Co) 
assembled. Omnipotent Parliament, De Lolme says, can do any- 
thing but make a man a woman or a woman a man; wherefore 
petition is a precious right for a free people having so parted 
with their sovereignty. But where the people are sovereign, and 
Congress only their specific trustees, the popular right is to in- 
struct, and petition by any majority is a degradation. Texas and 
slavery, furiously denounced in these miscalled petitions and 
otherwise throughout New England, New York, and some other 
States, were overpowered there. Discriminating as this account 
of negro slavery is designed to do between that and Texas, and 
reserving the latter for another occasion, it is only necessary to 
add here that the British and French coalition to abolish slavery 
and prevent annexation, both defeated by unaided Texas herself, 
nevertheless excited in acting President Tyler's administration 
strenuous determination to protect both Texas and slavery from 
European interference. 

Finding that administration resolved, and the whole p 
excited, Lord Aberdeen, alarmed, on the 20th June, 18-i-i, sent 
for Mr. Ashbel Smith, to whom his lordship expressed his 
regret that so much excitement had been caused on the other side 
of the Atlantic, and gave every assurance that nothing more 
should be done on the subject, which was to be managed by what 
was culled a new feature, viz: The English ministry were then 
confident that annexation was defeated, President Houston having, 
as was believed, abandoned it for Texan solitary independence. 
But, to the astonishment of the European clandestine hindrance 
of those results, Texas came into the United States with slavery. 



25 

After relinquishing ardently urged abolition in order to frustrate 
strenuously resisted annexation, both, by superior Texan diplo- 
macy, were settled as Texas desired ; wherefore this account of 
African slavery in America, with European, particularly English 
meddling for abolition in Texas, will be closed with the British 
Secretary's warning to the American Secretary against slavery all 
over the world, as that warning amplified abolition. 

The new British minister, Mr. Pakenham, went to Washington 
instructed to withdraw slavery from contestation, but with explicit 
threat of British determination to abolish it everywhere, and to 
leave no effort untried to prevent the United States annexing Texas. 
Accordingly, in his first official interview with Mr. Upshur, the 
Secretary of State who succeeded Mr. Webster, Lord Aberdeen's 
remarkable letter of the 26th December, 1844, was read by the 
Briton to the American as follows: — 

It is not necessary to incorporate with this narrative the prior 
part of Lord Aberdeen's letter, which is confined to Texas alone. 
After disposing of that subject, the letter proceeds concerning 
slavery as follows: — 

"But in thus acting we have no occult design, either with 
reference to any peculiar influence which we might seek to 
establish in Mexico or in Texas, or even with reference to slavery 
which now exists, and which we desire to see abolished in Texas. 

" With regard to the latter point, it must be, and is well known, 
both to the United States and to the whole world, that Great 
Britain desires, and is constantly exerting herself to procure the 
general abolition of slavery throughout the world; but the means 
which she has adopted, and will continue to adopt, for this 
humane and virtuous purpose, are open and undisguised. She 
will do nothing secretly or underhand. She desires that her 
motives may be generally understood, and her acts seen by all. 

" With regard to Texas, we avow that we wish to see slavery 
abolished there, as elsewhere; and we should rejoice if the 
recognition of that country by the Mexican Government, should 
be accompanied by an engagement on the part of Texas, to 
abolish slavery eventually, and under proper conditions, through- 
out the republic. But although we earnestly desire, and feel it to 
be our duty to promote such a consummation, we shall not inter- 
fere unduly, or with an improper assumption of authority, with 
either party, in order to insure the adoption of such a course. 



26 

We shall counsel, but we shall not seek to compel, or unduly 
control either part}-. So far as Great Britain is concerned, pro- 
vided other States act with equal forbearance, those Governments 
will be fully at liberty to make their own unfettered arrange- 
ments with each other, both in regard to the abolition of slavery, 
and to all other points. 

"Great Britain, moreover, does not desire to establish in Texas, 
whether partially dependent on Mexico, or entirely independent 
(which latter alternative we consider in every respect preferable), 
any dominant influence. She only desires to share her influence 
equally with all other nations. Her objects are purely com- 
mercial, and she has no thought or intention of seeking to act, 
directly or indirectly, in a political sense, on the United States 
through Texas. 

"The British Government, as the United States well know, 
have never sought in any way, to stir up disaffection or excite- 
ment of any kind in the slave-holding States of the American 
Union. Much as we should wish to see those States placed on the 
firm and solid footing, which we conscientiously believe is to be 
attained by general freedom alone, we have never in our treat- 
ment of them, made any difference between the slave-holding and 
the free States of the Union. All are in our eyes, entitled, as 
component members of the Union, to equal political r 
favor, and forbearance on our part. To that wise and just policy 
we shall continue to adhere; and the governments of the slave- 
holding States may be assured that, although we shall not desist 
from those open and honest efforts, which we have constantly 
made for procuring the abolition of slavery throughout the w< »rl 1. 
we shall neither openly nor secretly resort to any measures which 
can tend to disturb their internal tranquillity, or thereby to effect 
the prosperity of the American Union. 

"You will communicate this despatch to the United States 
Secretary of State, and, if he should desire it, you will leave a 
copy of it with him." 

Three days after that letter was read to Mr. Upshur, on the 
29tb of February, 1815, he was killed in the explosion of the 
i- Princeton, during an entertainment given on board that 
vessel by her commander Captain Stockton, when several other 
persons accidentally perished. Mr. Calhoun, appointed Secre- 
tary of State to succeed Abel P. Upshur, addressed on the 28th 



27 

April, 1845, a formal but not very fortunate official answer to 
Mr. Pakenkaru, intended to refute Lord Aberdeen's condemnation 
of slavery; to which no American was more attached than Mr. 
Calhoun, and which by statistical developments he strove to vin- 
dicate. The British minister, without taste, talents, or instruc- 
tions for such polemics, replied with curt and characteristic sneer, 
that he was not disposed to trespass on Mr. Calhoun's attention, by 
offering any remarks on the subject of slavery, as expounded in 
Mr. Calhoun's note, wihich would be transmitted to her majesty's 
government. 

And by them ridiculed in privy council, no doubt. Secretary 
Upshur's animated correspondence on this subject with the 
American ministers in England, Mexico and Texas, imputed the 
British movement to sinister and invidious design. Perhaps that 
complaint could hardly be assigned in official letters to the British 
ministers. But Mr. Calhoun's very superior abilities might have 
been better exercised than in statistical apologies for slavery. Its 
British ministerial impeachment was none the less improper, un- 
usual, dangerous, or obnoxious to rebuke for being avowed sincere 
and earnest. Lord Aberdeen forgot Admiral Cochrane's proclama- 
tion in 1814, inviting the southern slaves to revolt, the Duke of 
Wellington's favorite General, Sir Charles Napier's published boast 
that by slave insurrection the United States might be subdued, 
and many other equally offensive and futile English menaces and 
attempts. All these Lord Aberdeen forgot when declaring that 
the British government, as the United States well know, have 
never sought in any way to stir up disaffection or excitement of 
any kind in the slave-holding States of the American Union, and 
never in our (British) treatment of them, have made any differ- 
ence between the slave-holding and the free States of the Union. 
Lord Palmerston was in the ministry of war when Admiral 
Cochrane's proclamation was scattered broadcast throughout the 
slave-holding coasts, calling on the slaves to revolt. 

But perhaps the argument is stronger by taking Lord Aberdeen 
at his word, and not ascribing bad motive to his swooping and 
audacious denunciation of slavery. What if Secretary Calhoun 
had retorted that the United States, as the British government 
well knows, have never sought in any way to stir up disaffection 
or excitement of any kind in Ireland against England. Much as 
the United States would wish to see Great Britain placed on the firm 



23 

and solid footing, -which the United States conscientiously believe 
is to be attained by freedom of Ireland alone, from the cruel 
thraldom in which it has been so long held by England, we have 
never in our treatment of Great Britain made any difference be- 
tween Ireland and England; and although we shall not desist from 
those open and honest efforts which we have constantly made for 
securing the establishment of freedom throughout the world, &c, 
parodying nearly the whole of Lord Aberdeen's warning against 
slavery by substituting Ireland for that American vitalit} T , as or- 
ganic to the United States as Ireland to Great Britain ; not like 
Ireland requiring a large regular army to hold it down, but 
protected by that democratic nationality which Secretary Canning 
once threatened to let loose against the tyrannies of continental 
Europe, should they by force uphold Spanish South American 
white servitude. If no American Secretary of State would have 
aright thus to warn an English ministry, whit right has that 
ministry thus to warn an American Secretary ? In the lifetime 
of the North American British colonies and states, have their negro 
slaves been more oppressed by masters than Irish by English ? 
While contented American slaves have vastly increased, wretched 
Irish peasantry have vastly decreased in numbers. While not 
much more than one in three thousand of the slaves has fled from 
ownership, and that under foreign subornation, several hundred 
thousands of Irish every year have escaped from native huts and 
intolerable hardships to seek among American slaves hi 
homes. 

Or might not the American Secretary, reproached by a British 
Secretary with slavery, reply that British hereditary legislators 
much more contravene the spirit of the age than American here- 
ditary bondsmen? Slavery is vouchsafed, and nobility forbid by 
the constitution of the United States. Conformably to modern 
tendency, one of the most enlightened nations of Europe have 
abolished nobility with its feudal privileges, whose detrimental con- 
tinuance in Britain can be justified or accounted for only by the 
deep-seated tradition of an evil difficult of eradication. Yet nobility 
can be abolished in Britain much more easily than slavery in the 
United States. Nobility is less ancient than slavery, more irra- 
tional, and more obnoxious to reasonable condemnation. In the 
I war with Russia, a brave English army was sacrificed to the 
ignorance and incapacity of noble officers appointed through aria- 



29 

tocratic influence instead of personal merit. Such was the loud 
complaint, not of radicals or chartists, but of the educated, opulent, 
and respectable middle class of that intelligent kingdom, to whose 
energetic remonstrances and the alarming castigation of bitter ex- 
perience some reforms of ennobled and wealthy aristocracy were 
yielded. Government more democratized from prince to pauper, 
was elicited by a crisis which tried the strongest springs of Great 
Britain. Loss of much of that foreign respect which constitutes 
part of her mighty power, that charm and confidence felt by Eng- 
land herself, and by other nations in her capacity and wisdom, that 
illusion was much diminished. Lords Lucan, Cardigan, and other 
brave but incompetent soldiers, betrayed in the Crimea the fatal 
insufficiency of mere bravery and nobility when matched agaiust 
meritorious equality. Nobility, much more detrimental to Great 
Britain than slavery to America, in all probability will be 
abolished there before slavery here. 

Interference of the British government with others, an insen- 
sate and insufferable mischief and grievance, never was more 
offensive or abortive than by excessive, intemperate ardor to 
abolish slavery, as Lord Aberdeen admonished Mr. Upshur, 
throughout the world. The immense potentiality of that vast 
maritime empire beleaguering the globe with her fortresses, owning 
large part of it by her colonies, American, Asiatic, African, and 
European, with fleets which from Australia to Malta are ubiqui- 
tous and irresistible, all fired by promise of plunder to seize slave- 
dealers, and commanded by codes of terrific bloodshed to hunt 
and them through every sea, seize and put them to death as pirates 
foes of mankind, together with vilification of all slave-holders — 
than such fresh crusade, propagand, and outlawry, what legendary 
crusade or ancient servile war was ever more sanguinary or exter- 
minating: — All this sudden and recent revulsion from former 
British government, outstripping all others in encouraging kings, 
princes, and nations to enrich themselves by slave trade, as the best 
of all traffic, and slavery as indispensable to the prosperity of trans- 
atlantic possessions. The Assiento contract coveted, intrigued for, 
and effected as a great national succedaneum in one century, is 
repudiated, and all those who deal in such commerce hunted to 
be hanged, early in the next century, as not merely pirates, but 
monstrous, atrocious, and unpardonable sinners: In one age all 



30 

nations, induced to compete for what early in the next age all are 
compelled to destroy as enormous iniquity. 

The same England whose monarch boasted to the Lords spirit- 
ual and temporal, and Commons in Parliament assembled of the 
Assiento contract, is that which keeps a permanent commission or 
board in Cuba to suppress Spanish slave trade, which foreign 
and hostile superintendence induces British interference with the 
Spanish domestic tenure as well as foreign trade of slavery. A few 
years after frustration of the combined British and French attempt 
on Texas and slavery, that meddlesome and troublesome minister 
Lord Palmerston, officially instructed Lord Ilowden, the British, 
minister in Spain, to manage British interference with Spanish 
slavery in Cuba, so as furthermore to defeat the well-known desire 
of the United States to acquire that island, whose indispensable ad- 
vantage, commanding the great western outlet of the United States, 
has been latterly triumphantly demonstrated by Mr. Everett, 
Secretary of State, in admirable letters to the French and British 
ministers in the United States. Lord Palmerston nevertheless, or 
perhaps therefore, complicates British meddling with. Spain and 
the United States, slave trade and slavery, and Cuba altogether 
by one blow of his foreign policy. " I have to instruct your Lord- 
ship to say to the Spanish ministers that the slaves form a large 
portion, and by no means an unimportant one, of the people of 
Cuba, and that any steps taken for their emancipation would 
therefore, as far as the black population is concerned, be quite in 
unison with the recommendation of her majesty's government, 
that measures should be adopted for contenting the people of Cuba, 
with a view to secure the connection between the Spanish owners 
and the island; and it must be evident that if the negro popula- 
tion were rendered free, that fact would create a most powerful 
element of resistance to any scheme of annexing Cuba to the 
United States, where slavery exists." 

There seems to be no limit to British machination and encroach- 
ment, whenever abolition, however revolutionary and convulsive, 
can be made to arrest American territorial development, however 
natural, vicinal, peaceable, and inoffensive. Cuba, the gem of the 
Antilles, thrown back to barbarism, like St. Domingo and Jamaica, 
is preferred to that fine island, flourishing with magnificent pros- 
perity as one of the United States, in peace and liberty. 

Not Long ago a British minister, afterwards in the United States, 



31 

was peremptorily expelled from Spain for impertinent advice 
concerning Spanish internal concerns, in which high-toned move- 
ment of a once great and always sensitive nation, a noble Spaniard 
with American blood in his veins, grandson of an eminent Go- 
vernor of Pennsylvania, was conspicuous. May such blood pulsate 
in the executive of the United States to repel the insult, should 
ever the admonition of Lord Aberdeen concerning slavery be 
repeated ! 

For the results of these excesses have been, by British confes- 
sion, increase and aggravation of the alleged cruelties of the slave 
trade, with clamorous and rancorous but utter abortion of violent 
abolition in the United States. All trial of the temperate essay 
of abolition by slave-holders themselves, supplanted by frantic 
fratricidal, external compulsion, incessantly tormenting, provok- 
ing, and alarming a community — by their vilifying assailants, 
accused of aggression and violence, because robbers, burglars, and 
incendiaries threaten and beset their homesteads, whom they en- 
deavor to repel, and punish as merciless invaders. 

After twenty years of anarchy, idleness, and ruin in Jamaica, 
and Lord Palmerston's instruction to Lord Ilowden to advise 
the Spanish government to effect a still more deplorable chaos in 
Cuba, wretched savages transported from India, called coolies, are 
British practical, superadded to other confession that Jamaica is 
ruined, and that Cuba will be, by British abolition, if enforced by 
England in the latter as in the former island. A Caribbean con- 
federacy of black banditti buccaneers, St. Domingo, Jamaica, and 
Cuba, with perhaps other West India islands under the protecto- 
rate of Great Britain, may be erected, with their Musquito surro- 
gate prince, to execute European justice in America by such in- 
human abolition of slavery throughout the world. 

Perturbation permanent, rabid disloyalty, abominable infidelity, 
inhuman hatred of their fellow-countrymen, whom their Christian 
duty is to love as themselves, are the forlorn condition in the 
United States of those root and branch abolitionists, who reject 
their country, which flourishes with prodigies of production, in 
profound tranquillity throughout the slave-holding States. No 
military force compels order and law on plantations where cheer- 
ful slaves obey masters by every motive bound to protect and 
cherish them. Large drafts from the standing army of the United 
States are frequently required to protect the mere administration 



82 

of justice from rebellious resistance of bloodthirsty fanatics in 
the principal cities of the United States. 

While the uproar of northeastern tribunes, pulpits, books, 
and journals were mere brute thunder, only alarming and mis- 
chievous by distant echoes in slave-holding regions, frequent 
mobs of conventiclers, male and female, clerical and partisan, 
British and American, inebriate with passion for agitation and 
notoriety, struck with incendiary lightning in the localities 
where they fell, provoking slave-holders to more stern, exclu- 
sive, and dominant enforcement of the strictest slavery. But 
the paroxysms of these abolition orgies effectuated more elevated, 
systematized, enduring, and dangerous, but regulated disorgani- 
zation, where there were no slaves. Governors of States were 
excited officially to recommend legislators to enact, and judges 
to enforce acts of assembly, with all the forms, perhaps the 
force, of laws militant against federal authority; by their annual 
and special messages to legislatures, denouncing federal laws 
and the federal constitution itself as odiously obnoxious to re- 
jection. Legislatures, by refinements of State rights, forbade 
State functionaries, judicial or administrative, to co-operate in the 
enforcement of federal supremacy, emasculated its force, and de- 
fied its control. Judges interpolated crude mistakes of English 
common law and English legal policy, in States where there is 
no such law or policy concerning negro slavery, but the reverse 
was always the established jurisprudence. Among these sacrifices 
by worship of British apostasy from slavery, was the degenerate 
repeal in 1826 of the eleventh, the vital section, of the benevo- 
lent Pennsylvania abolition act of 1780. The heart of that wise, 
comprehensive, and exemplary essay of rational abolition was 
torn out by the reigning fanaticism of England, spreading 
throughout the northern United States. Despite a federal con- 
stitution for more perfect union, States were antagonized and 
sundered, which clung to each other with continental comity and 
national adherence, when only allied by loose confederation, with 
no provision concerning slavery. All this percutient perfidy to 
the constitution, to confraternity and nationality, backsliding from 
aboriginal, indispensable union and communion, could not 
without deplorable consequences throughout the whole United 
States. Four grain growing States were arrested in their palpable 
tendency to emancipate themselves from the expense aud annoy- 



33 

ance of unprofitable slave labor, indispensable only for the culti- 
vation of rice, cotton, sugar, and tobacco, of the three former of 
which they grew none, and did not require slaves for the latter. 
The slaves themselves, advancing to national independence as 
each successive generation indicated, by improvement, religious, 
moral, mental, mechanical, industrial, with the cordial consent and 
assistance of their masters, were deprived of these inestimable 
advantages, and thrown back from their transition from African 
barbaric savagism to civilized freedom. The slaves of Vir- 
ginia and Carolina, by British overpowering and perverting Ame- 
rican abolition, were driven back to the dark dens of Jamaican 
slavery; where an act of Parliament, instead of its gradual 
amelioration, imperiously cut the knot which might have been 
gradually and kindly untied by such an experiment as the Penn- 
sylvania act of 1780, and Jefferson and Franklin, if not Wilber- 
force, contemplated. 

State government, executive, legislative, and judicial declared 
war on the government of the United States, waged at length by 
mobs with clerical leaders, sometimes deluded Quakers, forcibly 
and furiously attacking officers administering law, with much 
more bloodthirsty ferocity than it ever was encountered by those 
stigmatized as border ruffians by those highwaymen in drab or 
canonicals. 

This historical apology for African slavery in America neither 
condemns or justifies the stupendous reality which metropolitan 
force and favor planted throughout the English North American 
united colonies, and nurtured to grow with their forests, indige- 
nous to soil and climate, and as ineradicable. Some thirty years ^ 
after American independence, England, by sudden revolution 
or remorse, sharply reversed her ethical system, running head- 
long into a theoretical abstraction. Slave trade and tenure were "\ 
discovered to be unjust, and before long to be iniquitous. The 
whole world was required to undergo the same reversal of opinion r 
required by force, fleets, and largesses. The powers to whom r 
like England, it was all mere theory, were easily prevailed upon. 
"Weaker but interested powers were coerced by the extreme zeal 
of England, some of them even purchased to submit. To the 
United States submission is impossible, involves constitutional 
and continental disorganization. The British government having 
3 



34 

officially sanctioned American abolition by warning to that of 
the United States, the propagand is prosecuted by the people after 
the government disowns it. In the presidential election jusl 
closed, the British people intervened with avowed and great 
anxiety. The British press, an immense engine of public senti- 
ment, unanimously advocated the election of a candidate because 
the American abolitionists were his advocates. His asserted 
abolition was the avowed British motive for their intervention ; 
and no doubt, had he been elected, the same British intervention 
would have urged British measures of root and branch abolition. 

Such transatlantic and extravagant, and revolutionary intrusion, 
encourages hope that Britain herself may become sensible of its 
useless but pernicious impropriety. If the British motive bo 
good-will either to the slaves or the United States, the error of 
their meddling must become obvious to themselves. New England 
will forbear when England sets the example. Abolition may 
then begin, but never till then. English aversion to American 
liberty was not long ago as intense and intolerant as now to 
American slavery. English hostility to France, to free trade, to 
colonial self-government, to freedom of the seas, to freedom of 
suffrage, and other liberalisms, in which Great Britian has ap- 
proximated American principles since American independence, 
may induce her to perceive that her mission on earth is not, as 
Lord Aberdeen warned Mr. Upshur, to secure the abolition of 
slavery throughout the world; and even if so, that her method 
hitherto has tended only to increase and aggravate both the trade 
.Mid the tenure. 

Just as English conversion from slavery to abolition, transcend- 
ing all the rational reform inculcated by English, as well as 
American originators of a benignant essay, was rising to fever 
and blood heat, special providence interposed to overpower fana- 
fcieism by a still stronger, and more natural influence. Great 
Britain, with all her might by law, municipal, colonial, and inter- 
national, by treaties, navies, foreign agents, and public sentiment, 
subdued to unanimity, propagating her new dogma of abrupt and 
forcible emancipation of negroes, was encountered and vanquished 
by practical satisfaction of the instinctive love of accumulation, 
fortifying slave masters individually, and their country altogether, 
with impregnable security. Pragmatic rabid abolition was calmly 
discomfited by plantation productiveness. Regions of amazing 



35 

fruitfulness, cultivated by negro slaves— if not the only laborers 
adapted, the only ever tried for that climate and soil — brought 
forth prodigious opulence. Cotton rose from their labor on that 
soil to clothe and pacify the world; talisman of peaceable power, 
of union, tranquillity, and nationality, not more valuable to the 
southwestern slave-holder than to the northeastern abolitionist. 
Commerce, navigation, manufactures, all the creations of the 
north, received fresh and prodigious impulse from a southern 
plant. Carolina and Georgia had granted Mississippi to the 
United Slates before they were joined by federal compact, 
when confederated by that innate necessity for union which 
preceded and transcends their constitutional junction. Louisiana 
superadded immense territories for progressive development- 
Thereupon a staple arose to dethrone iron, long the reigning 
staple of England's industrial superiority, and her standard of 
comparative national civilization. 

I may be allowed to incorporate here, with a material view of 
the influence of slave-cultured cotton on American prosperity and 
peace, sentiments I delivered more than twenty years ago, since 
when, the growth of cotton has increased from four hundred 
thousand, to nearly four millions of bales, with commensurate 
increase of wealth, grandeur, and peace. 

"Nearly simultaneously with the Navigation Act, cotton sprang 
unexpectedly from the mother earth of this country, to become a 
miracle of agriculture, of commerce, of navigation, and of manu- 
factures. Its increase is more incredible than the fabulous story 
of the armed men, who are said to have started from the soil of 
Greece, or the armed hero leaping into the Gulf of Some. Four 
hundred millions of pounds is the annual crop of a small part of 
the American soil, rather more than one-half of which is wrought 
by the artisans of England, with a profit that is the root of Bri- 
tish power, and must, in time, become the greatest power of Ame- 
rica. Nearly the other half is about equally divided between the 
manufactures of France and our own. Cotton fabrications now 
more than treble those of iron, and in combination with steam, 
have changed the whole face of civilization. A seed fertilized bv 
the waters of freedom, though cultivated by the hand of slavery, 
has rendered the English race, on both sides of the Atlantic, the 
workmen of the world. Almost superseding linen, eclipsing silk, 
and vying with woollen, cotton is the cheapest, finest, warmest, 



36 

cleanest, strongest, most beautiful, lasting, and wholesome, the 
safest and best material for clothing, bedding, many parts of 
furniture, and, it is believed, the canvas of shipping. If all 
Christendom were clothed in cotton, or even cotton mixed with 
woollen, as it is admirably manufactured in this country, the eco- 
nomy of cost would equal the whole expenditure of many nation?, 
maintaining large standing armies; and the economy of life would 
perhaps equal its waste by means of those armies." 

"If iron is the basis of boasted British superiority, it may be 
affirmed of cotton, that it not only by freights and manufactures, 
cements the American Union, but that it is an element of Ameri- 
can sovereignty, and universal equality. While ever silk, velvet, 
■and line linen, were the dress of upper classes, they were distin- 
guished from common people as much by garb, as by rank. It 
was impossible for the poor to look like the rich, who, in cos- 
tume, were their betters. But cotton has levelled this distinction, 
and destroyed inequality in the appearances of the different classes 
more effectually than American legislation, or even the French 
revolution. All classes now look alike in an article of universal 
habiliment, which the poor can always get, and the rich cannot 
dispense with. If equality bo essential to the perfection of 
liberty, cotton, sprung from that part of this country where the 
utmost inequality prevails, superadds equality to the liberty 
which, it has been attempted to be shown, came into being with 
the discovery of America." 

Recollecting how miraculously Louisiana came to the United 
States for their expansion, and seeing how cotton enriches their 
inhabitants, altogether North as well as South, and fortifies their 
whole union against foreign or intestine disturbances, it is the 
most natural emotion of American patriotism gratefully to ac- 
knowledge the special providence of such blessings. All the 
wide-spread United States, infrangibly welded together by the 
product of slave labor, impart to their vast commerce an extent 
and freedom not anticipated when commerce and slavery com- 
promised for more perfect union by a constitution, whose wisest 
IVamers could not anticipate such prodigious and early prosperity. 
Northeastern and southwestern commonwealths, without armed 
pulsion, held together in natural conjunction by reciprocal de- 
uce; sovereign States rapidly rilling with sovereign people, 
as peaceably as irresistibly realize the whole American experi 



37 

mcnt of self-government, by agriculture, and commerce, navigation 
and manufactures, all useful arts in unequalled progress, with the 
fine and elegant also in rapid introduction. States and cities mul- 
tiplying, beyond example, the annual harvests of combined liberty 
and slavery, with scarce an effort, repel and annul speculative, far- 
distant, theoretical philanthropy in vain decrying such national 
greatness. Five millions added to two millions of slave owners, 
four millions the increase of seven hundred thousand slaves, eight 
more prosperous States, all the offspring of American union since 
independence, by practical refutation disprove the prejudice of 
Old, teaching New England that slavery contaminates and dwarfs 
whatever it touches. Four millions of slaves living contented with 
eight millions of masters, enjoy habitations, food, and raiment, such 
as no peasantry is allowed, and tranquillity unknown wherever 
rampant abolition rails at their condition. Such is the history, 
such the growth of the United States, since Great Britain surren- 
dered to them all their negro slaves as national property. 

Such peace, order, and quiet, prejudice, either national or pro- 
vincial, European or remote American, in vain reproaches as 
misery and sin. Sudden and forcible deracination of a root of 
such enjoyments, is as irrational and impracticable as the enforce- 
ment of a law to prohibit the growth of cotton. 

Negro slavery and representative democracy, by universal suf- 
frage, are American specialities, of which other countries having 
no experience, their governing classes instinctively condemn. 
This view of the American experiment does not insist that it will 
succeed, but presents the national situation by historical ascertain- 
ment, and for nearly a century the trial has certainly been per- 
fectly and wonderfully successful. European disparagement of 
American democracy was long as explicit as it has become of 
slavery. Detraction of democracy has subsided into mere appre- 
hension and vituperation. Abuse of slavery has grown with the 
formidableness of less abused democracy, and the hopelessness of 
abolishing more abused slavery. No European analogy warrants 
condemnation of the thus far successful American combination of 
slavery with liberty, the solution of a problem peculiar to these 
United States. American negro slavery is not bondage so severe 
as villanage or serfdom, and less oppressive than that of peasants, 
paupers, Jews, and other outcasts from European equality, the 
toiling millions of that continent, and of Asia. British free- 



s 



38 

dora, the basis and model of American, is nevertheless much sur- 
passed by it. Other European freedom, less than either American 
or British, little better than revolutionary parody by volcanic 
outbreaks, precursors of despotism, is totally unlike the calm, 
calculating, and lucrative American love of liberty, which seldom 
mistakes revolt for reform, or confounds spoliation of private 
property with change of public politics. Abolition of American 
negro slavery is the cry of nearly all Europe, where abolition 
from their servitude is insurgent, sanguinary, and spasmodic; rumi- 
nated in German universities, exciting discontented populace to 
extort homicidal relief from monarchs, privileged classes, priests, 
and others, who have no sympathies with those they rule. Hun- 
dreds of thousands of fugitives from European bondage attest its 
hardships, escaping to American homes, where negro slavery is 
blended with liberty, while of four millions of negro slaves, little 
more than one in every thousand fly from bondage, and that only 
when stimulated by abolition. 

Irish Britons, composing a large portion of these fugitives 
from English masters, were, for several ages, ruled much more 
severely than American negro slaves, governed with much greater 
difficulty, and were a much greater reproach and peril to England 
than negro slavery to the United States, where no large standing- 
army is necessary to preserve peace in the slave-holding States, as 
is indispensable in Ireland. 

Servitude, worse than African, was not abolished in England, 
till the revolution of 1G88, preceding ours by only about one cen- 
turv. English abolition of Irish servitude is not yet accomplished. 
While England is free, compared with other European nations, 
yet French, German, or other continental nations, have but faint 
notions of American freedom, of which the national idiocrasy is 
not duly comprehended even by the English, whose hereditary 
aristocracy is an institution much less rational, and much more 
vulnerable than American negro slavery. But the vast power of 
an insular nation induces their perpetually meddling with others, 
to regulate their misunderstood internal government. National 
and partial English sovereignty is resigned in one day of elec- 
tion by the people, to an omnipotent Parliament. National 
sovereignty in the United States never leaves the people, whose 
irresistible voice is obeyed like the voice of God. Of federal 
union by sovereign States, English polities have no idea. Their 



39 

union is absorption of Scots, Welsh, Irish, and all colonial in- 
dividualities in omnipotent British nationality, without any re- 
semblance of that State sovereignty by which negro slavery is 
created, as part of that sovereignty, as much as the soil or climate 
of the particular States, altogether superintended and protected. 
but not internally regulated by federal supremacy. When med- 
dling England reproaches the United States with slavery, or with 
repudiation of debts, there are few of the best informed English 
who comprehend that both are affairs of the States, not the nation. 
England should understand American institutions before railing 
at, or attempting to reform them. 

Latterly, converted by American example, Great Britain has 
substituted something like the American federation of States for 
her colonial system, which was once, like the Spanish, altogether 
exclusive and metropolitan. If Jamaica had been governed in 
1834 as Canada is now, that fine island would not have been 
ruined by act of Parliament, expending a hundred millions of 
dollars for abolition, ordered absolutely without consent, and not- 
withstanding remonstrance of the Jamaica British. Awakening 
to the wise policy of self-government, England may yet discover 
the justice of leaving the sovereign, though United States, their 
traditional and undeniable right of each: State to govern slaves 
inherited from a mother country, as she rules minors, apprentices, 
paupers, Jews, soldiers, sailors, and other subjects under pupil- 
age; their protection indicated as inherent to the national sove- 
reignty over all. 

Whether African slavery in America be evil or not, is a very 
small part of the problem to be solved. Beyond all question, and 
overpowering all denunciation, four millions of slaves cannot be 
liberated at once, without universal and ruinous disorganization 
and distress inflicted upon the whole twenty-five or thirty mil- 
lions of the American people, free and bond, and final fatal catas- 
trophe of the grand experiment of cheap self-government. In 
England, or in Europe, abolition is like stars and garters, the 
plaything or bauble, for the most part, of well-meaning theorists; 
but, in this country, a cataclysm, which no rational being can 
contemplate without dread. None but fanatics like those who. 
in the English and French revolutions, ruled for a time with ter- 
ror and bloodshed, recommend such abolition. But better and 
wiser men are responsible for the introduction of such dreadful 



40 

end to their beginning. Mr. Adams, I believe, always denied 
that he was an abolitionist. Mr. Webster, in one of his eastern 
apothegms, is reported to have pronounced slavery "a blight, a 
blast, a mildew, curse, and scourge," to the delight, probably, of 
many hearers, as ignorant as he who uttered that ebullition, all 
without practical knowledge of what he reprobated. 

When that vital cement of American union became the test of 
a national crisis, Mr. Webster, feeling its vitality, renounced the 
groundless prejudice of Old and New England, and exerted not 
only his superior eloquence, but his powerful logic, in vindication 
of much abused slavery. Nor has or can any American patriot 
hesitate in preference for his country with that evil, if it be evil, 
rather than endanger it for a sentimental abstraction dictated from 
abroad. For abolition, though a general inclination, is not, in its 
excesses, an American emotion. Henry Clay, another of the emi- 
nent slave-holding abolitionists, throughout his long course of 
patriotic service, constantly presented the view of that difficult 
subject of which my statement is but an expatiation. 

It is easy and too common to rail at negro slavery in the United 
States. Not England alone, or New England, but much of Europe, 
have united in one loud, long howl against it: yet it would per- 
plex the wisest of all these choristers of its abominations, to ex- 
plain what harm England, or New England, France, or Holland, 
suffer from negro slavery in Virginia or Carolina ? Their inhe- 
rited attachment to it, its advantages to the distant States and 
countries vituperating it, its indispensability to the grand Ameri- 
can experiment of liberty and peace, have been indicated by this 
tract. Can any distant abolitionist tell how it injures him or his 
home ? Zealots affect to scoff at cotton lords and the selfish advan- 
tages of slave products. But is the lucrative ever disregarded in 
man's pursuit of happiness ? lias the Creator constituted man of 
pure sentiment, without selfishness ? Those American abolition- 
ists who disparage as mercenary the cotton plea, descend from 
ancestors who took up arms against a trifling impost on tea; to 
whose succor their slave-holding fellow-countrymen instantly ral- 
lied, without counting the cost. If they contended for a cardinal 
principle, love of independence was not a nobler principle. 

Just before British intervention in the Late presidential election, 
war between the United States and Great Britain was prevented 
by nothing but slave-grown cotton. Without entering upon any 



41 

discussion of a terminated controversy, closed by cotton alone, 
the facts are, that the government of the United States, for what 
it deemed British interference with onr neutrality, by discharging 
the British minister and three consuls, inflicted a mortifying 
insult on that mighty and proud nation. Their finest fleets ever 
equipped, were ready and eager for exploit, which the ministry 
must have desired to sec achieved by terrific hostilities in Ame- 
rica. The American seaports, from Portsmouth to Francisco, 
were all easily accessible, and nearly defenceless. It is said that 
when Lord Palmerston considered this subject, Loudon urged the 
blow then, because England was never better, this country never 
worse, prepared for tremendous memento of the might of Britain. 

But Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds, Liverpool, Glasgow, in a 
word, British, manufactures and commerce in American cotton, 
expostulated, and their appeal was too strong for national pride 
and enormous power. 

Alleged immoralities, cruelties, and barbarities, imputed to 
slavery, all granted for argument's sake, what are they to the 
iniquities, devastations, bloodshed, and other sufferings insepara- 
ble from war? All that morbid fancy or sober reason can allege 
against slavery, all its imputed wrongs and woes, are insignificant 
compared with those of war, which it prevented. Instead of 
republican government, with permanent, well-nigh perpetual 
peace, secured by plantation produce, war, in the present strength 
and temper of the American people, might, and probably would 
unsettle its cheap, pacific institutions, and implant a passion for 
arms, of which it is impossible to foresee or imagine the conse- 
quences. One year's war would cause more misery than a cen- 
tury of negro slavery. 

Xations, undoubtedly, if not individuals, are governed, not by 
their sentiments, but their interests. And the mistake of perhaps 
the shrewdest and most sagacious of mankind, which has kept 
them in perpetual commotion and never-ending disappointment, 
is that they have suffered their passions to rule their interests, 
while the distant fellow-countrymen they revile have constantly 
ministered to their prosperity. 

A rhapsody of revolutionary freedom, in 1848, broke out with 
volcanic rupture in France and Germany, not content with reform- 
ing politics, but striving to unhinge property. One of its State 
strokes of inconsiderate enthusiasm by metropolitan edict, exceed- 



42 

ing in poetry of politics, the more deliberate act of Parliament in 
1*34, set free the slaves in the French colonies of Martinique and 
Guadaloupe. The French results were the same as the English in 
Jamaica, only that the French negro slaves were more French than 
English slaves. Their only understanding of liberty was, that 
slaves freed were to do nothing; they did not choose to work, 
but preferred play ; singing, dancing, sports, and other idle re- 
creations, were substituted for labor. With no conception of in- 
dustrious independence or thrifty occupation, they misspent their 
whole time in frivolities. Sugar planting, already injured by beet 
sugar made by free labor in France, was ruined by slave liberty 
in the islands where it had flourished. Slavery is indispensable 
to its cultivation there, as the abolitionists continue to show by 
various contrivances to substitute hired labor for enslaved; for it 
is not a question between black and white laborers. The climate, 
if not fatal, at any rate overpowering to whites, is agreeable, if not 
salutary, to blacks. The laborers must be controlled by absolute 
masters, whether black or white. Abolition of slavery had there- 
fore rendered the French "West India Islands nearly valueless, till 
the imperial rule of Napoleon III., by gendarmery and other 
means of compulsion, restored something like slavery. Whether 
hired Asiatics or Africans are preferable to slaves for work in 
America, which white men have never yet done, is a problem 
which Europe has undertaken to solve for West Indian America, 
but which the United States will hardly suffer Europe to solve 
for them. 

Historical truth of African slavery in America presents an 
inveterate and stupendous organization by State necessity, conti- 
nental vitality, and constitutional arrangement, altogether imper- 
vious to external force, no matter whether good or evil, inde- 
structible by extraneous means, insusceptible of removal or 
reform but by intestine action within the sovereignties where it 
flourishes. 

Those indissolubly bound to such an institution have a pi 
right to be heard in its justification, moral as well as political, 
which of lute years they never are, but all their pleas of defence 
and plans of abolition are overwhelmed by torrents of passionate 
abuse and distant sentimental execration. Their justification I 
leave to themselves; having no practical familiarity with opera- 
tions I never witnessed, and like its distant revilers can compre- 



43 

hend only by the lights of history and political philosophy. Still 
there are important political considerations not to be pretermitted 
in the controversy excited by English and northeastern aspersion 
of slave-holding communities; not considerations of transient vul- 
gar politics, but of the logic by which statesmen found empires and 
administer government, to be briefly noticed in this explanation. 
Primary among the consoling verities elicited by the volcanic 
presidential election just done, trying this republican union, is de- 
monstration and assurance of its infrangibility. The brotherhood 
of English, indeed nearly all European with American abolition, 
has proved utterly unable to sunder states whose confederation, 
registered indeed by a federal muniment, rests on the indigenous 
bases of territorial configuration, vicinal and concrescent rivers 
and lakes, reciprocal physical dependencies, indispensable south- 
western contributions to national wealth, and their national de- 
velopment by eastern commerce, navigation, and manufactories. 
Such natural ligaments, like the waters, intercourse by traffic, 
travel, and intermarriages, language and other unities of these 
United States, tried by the orderly, however exciting contest be- 
tween four or more millions of suffragans as to whom they will 
employ to execute the federal laws, prove every lustrum to be 
infinitely stronger ties than noisy declamation is apt to allow. 

But ever since the whole earth was of one speech till scattered 
abroad from the building of Babel, northmen and south have 
been invidious of each other, and according to Pagan animosities 
even brothers often hate one another: solita fratribus odia, says 
Tacitus. So that the injunction of the author of Christianity is at 
once the most indispensable and most difficult of all sublime lessons 
that men should love their neighbors as themselves. By transi- 
tion too easy of depraved nature, northeastern aversion to slavery 
fastens on those upholding it, though neighbors and fellow coun- 
trymen, with contumelious obloqiiy of their morals, politics, man- 
ners, homes, soil, conduct, and condition altogether. Such invi- 
dious vanity of birthplace is the vulgarity of patriotism, but envy 
is its own executioner. Eastern emissaries traversing the Middle 
States, by odious comparisons to inculcate hatred of slave-holding - 
compatriots, peddle the partisan ignorance of disloyal abolition 
to those who know better, as all should know who are acquainted 
with American annals and permanent politics. The elder and 
greater luminaries of northeastern intelligence and patriotism were 



44 

far from shedding the false light of recent asteroids straying from 
their spheres under such total eclipse of the most familiar know- 
ledge as to set up the monstrous predication that a mere majority 
of numbers in a nation of confederated states may dominate the 
minority in numbers. Such seems to be the heresy of an itine- 
rant presiding officer of a house of representatives which, like the 
nation for whom it legislates, is absolutely fettered by multiplied 
rules and regulations to preserve the minority from the despotism 
of any mere majority. Docs not Massachusetts know that Delaware 
is her constitutional equal? and New York that New Jersey is 
likewise hers? The intolerable tyranny of unbridled majority 
is interdicted by the whole system of State sovereignty, with other 
constitutional checks and balances, all carefully arranged for har- 
monious freedom and coequal confederate nationality. A min< >rity 
surrendered at discretion to the capricious rule of transient num- 
bers, might be outlawed for abolition or by any other disorganiza- 
tion of the whole Union. Sixteen States might disfranchise or 
expel the other fifteen. Nothing betrays more palpably the inca- 
pacity of any portion of the United States to govern the whole 
than ignorant and ignominious assumption that the most nume- 
rous have thereby a right to rule the rest arbitrarily. 

That northeastern assumption of the fact of northern majority 
to rule a southern minority for the abolition of slavery is no 
fact or majority at all, but that the assumed northern majority is a 
northeastern minority, is fully established by the recent Presiden- 
tial election. The northern majority against abolition is a large 
overwhelming preponderance. For that or any similar assault 
upon the Union, Pennsylvania, with the other States of the 
central zone, will always be found a bulwark insurmountable by 
northeastern disloyalty. Before the Western States were estab- 
lished, prior to acknowledgment of independence, and when no 
federal constitution had been formed for more perfect union, in a 
spirit of continental nationality equally natural and conservative, 
Pennsylvania, by the abolition act of 1780, and a memorable pro- 
test, signalized her indissoluble copartnership with the slave-hold- 
ing States, and since then has never wavered from that intimacy. 
Northeastern politicians deprecated extension of the United States 
beyond the Ohio into the large territories there granted by South- 
ern States to the Union, which by territorial vicinal and riverain 
juxtaposition naturally ally the central with the slave-holding 



45 

Southern States. The plethoric northeast, with harsh climate 
and hard soil, sends forth continual emigration to milder seasons 
and more fruitful lands in the west; by schools, shops, handi- 
craft, and other useful complements to follow southwestern 
pioneers who, with rifle and spade, prepare the wilderness for 
civilization. Northeastern ingenuity always endeavors, and with 
occasional success, to propagate its prepossessions, of which abo- 
lition is one, and love of rule another. But while ever the vast 
western water highways bear prodigious productions to their 
natural outlet, the Gulf of Mexico, superiority of southwestern 
attraction for midland State enterprise must predominate through 
all that region from the Atlantic to the farthest west. North- 
eastern detachment of Pennsylvania or any other of these States 
from their natural affinit} r with the South, in desperate endeavor 
to fabricate a northern majority of such materials, is like the 
poet's simile of turning the tide with a pitchfork. Geographical 
and historical ignorance combined begets the gross mistake that 
if the United States could be separated, the centre would forsake 
the South. 

Before the acquisition of Louisiana, with its slave population 
guarantied by the treaty of purchase, that noble specimen of 
original Pennsylvania federalism, James Ross, moved in the 
Senate of the United States to seize forcibly on New Orleans, 
rather than risk losing the navigation of the Mississippi, or even 
confide its security to President Jefferson's pacific management. 
From that time to this, and at all times, Pennsylvania, with all 
the midland "Western States, have been naturally southern in 
their interests and sympathies, as they must ever be. Having by 
the abolition act of 1780, signalized her national and continental 
adhesion to the slave-holding States, merely as such, and with view 
exclusively to the question of slavery, Pennsylvania again in 1802 
took the lead with a view to that of western navigation. "With 
none, therefore, but fraternal feelings for the Northeast, but with 
insuperable resistance to their abolition and other disloyal notions, 
evolved from time to time, Pennsylvania, with the rest of the 
central zone, will never fail to prevent any northern majority 
enabling the Northeast to rule the Southwest ; majority equally 
impracticable, unconstitutional, and unterritorial. 

Mere refutation of that egregious misconception is not enough. 
Not confining itself at home, selfish northeastern propagation of 



46 

its own moral and political, physical and numerical superiority, 
harassing the centre by odious comparisons to unite in disparage- 
ment and abuse of the South, and separation from them, chal- 
lenges rebuke, as well as refutation, which the middle is the 
appropriate place to give. Reasonable emulation between North 
and South is natural and salutary. Whether exterior contrast 
between them is so glaring as the Northeast has latterly provoked 
the Southwest to deny by offensive retaliation, I am not qualified 
by practical acquaintance to determine. Where long winter and 
unfruitful soil compel more labor for livelihood than where long 
summer relaxes and exuberant soil supplies, busy industry is apt 
to look more smiling and be better regulated than by solitary 
routine of plantation life. And although what candid ascertain- 
ment might impute to climate and plenty, sectional antipatl 
down to slavery and its drudgery, yet probably social refinements 
are more general northeast than southwest. An American need 
not be of or descended from New England to be sensible of the 
great merits of that peculiar people, among whom principles and 
personages abound to be proud of. In schools, colleges, authors, 
by the great republic of letters, the powers of literature, and first 
American advances in the fine arts and sciences, they excel. But 
inferior as the Northeast always has been to the slave-holder 
in the introduction and establishment of free institutions, the 
partition and distribution of local advantages seem to be provi- 
dential to equalize union in harmony. Literary and scientific 
superiority counterbalance political supremacy. The Grecian 
excellence of oratory, history, invention, science, painting, poetry, 
sculpture, and navigation, may, without invidious malevolence, 
resign, as it must, supremacy in politics to the slave-holders, who, 
like Romans, have been the only founders, and original institutors 
of that system of government, which, beginning in the latter end 
of the last, has, during the present century, by its free, cheap, and 
pacific polity, placed the United States in the foremost rank of pros- 
perous and powerful empires. Like Rome, for many ages more 
known by actions than their description, slave-holders proclaimed 
those rights and founded those liberties which, like Greeks, the 
people of New England have best commemorated. Mere local 
controversy between North and South is insoluble. Whether 
New Hampshire and Massachusetts surpass Tennessee and Ala- 
bama in progressive improvements, whether Boston is more thriv- 



47 

ing, refined, or luxurious than Baltimore, who shall decide? But 
literature, tradition, and registered historical documents establish 
beyond all dispute that American independence, liberty, and 
written constitutions, bills of rights, with the other charters and 
consecrations of free government, all originated with slave-hofders 
on their plantations : rebuke invited by northeastern misrepre- 
sentation in late explosions of southern disparagement. 

The literature of American liberties was first edited by written 
constitutions of Virginia and North Carolina, in 1776, several 
years before Massachusetts or other States of New England 
followed their example. Both these slave-holding States likewise 
claim, with strong show of proof, to have published declarations 
of independence before that of the United States, at Philadelphia, 
on the -1th July, 1770. As originators and founders of the daring 
American experiment, not only of independence but larger liberty 
than was ever before ventured, slave-holders took the lead. Not 
a founder has arisen from among the learned cast; north of the 
North River, not one man capable of combining other men as 
a nation, ruling them in peace and leading them by polity to 
power. Heroic personages like Washington and Jefferson, to 
whom may be added Madison and Hamilton, to stamp the 
impress of genius for government on the American trial of it, 
were none of them from that portion of the United States whence 
have latterly sprung up those certainly not superior to the 
former great of that region, but who nevertheless claim the right 
to rule, as their superior predecessors never did or could. 

Rare in all ages and countries, and often in all ages and coun- 
tries not of indisputable superiority while living, posthumous re- 
nown consecrates the monumental individuality of the heroic great. 
Washington's priority is universally acknowledged. Jefferson's 
polity more contested, whether right or wrong (into which ques- 
tion this view does not enter), was undeniably that original and 
fundamental system, which has chiefly prevailed ever since founded 
by him. Slave-holders in the undisturbed meditation of planta- 
tion life, with frequent transactions in State representations, were 
the two principal founders of American free government, by 
whom its first practical development was organized with Wash- 
ington as primary Chief Magistrate, and Jefferson as his chief 
official counsellor, far advanced by them, with Madison in Con- 
gress and Hamilton in cabinet co-operating, before any of the 



48 

other eminent but secondary statesmen undertook it ; and when 
undertaken by northeastern statesmen of great knowledge, ex- 
perience, and patriotism, as far as they were personally concerned, 
it was an entire failure in their hands. 

North of the slave-holding States, among much eminence in 
many other ways, not a founder has appeared, not one man 
capable of ruling all other men. Every bill of rights and written 
constitution came first from the slave-holders, as if the intellectual 
like the material distribution of advantages was providentally 
equalized. As southern cotton, balancing northern commerce 
and navigation, the rights of man originated south, while the 
literary, scientific, and mechanical preponderance has been east. 
Those northeastern missionaries, who latterly traversed to illumi- 
nate the calmer latitudes of the middle ground, and indoctrinate 
abolition by excessive and grossly ignorant depreciation of slave- 
holders and their communities, not one of them could mention an 
American from the inauguration of the first President of the United 
States till now, unless a slave-holder, who has proved his capacity 
for ruling a nation, founding or governing people in common- 
wealth ; not one endowed by nature or enabled by art to control 
a mass of mankind. Every American founder of American 
liberty has been a slave-holder. Nor can there be greater mis- 
take of American history or polity, than northeastern assump- 
tion of a faculty for government, which, without offence, it must 
be said was never the attribute of northeastern statesmen, greater 
than those at present insisting on their right to rule, who ignor- 
ing the history of these united colonies and States, mistake 
their own mission and genius. The presidential election just 
closed in their discomfiture, is only one more added to many prior 
proofs that while in public speaking and writing, the press, the 
partisan pulpit, the forum, jurisprudential and legislative, while 
by all tribunitian means of clamor and commotion, they may 
excel in perturbation, yet for the last fifty years and more, ever 
since their first faint assault of the south and slavery began, with 
the acquisition of Louisiana till now, the northeast has always 
failed to overcome the masterly inactivity, and impregnable corn- 
pagination of the more tranquil slave-holding south. Against 
the British war, against the Mexican war, and without descending 
into party conflicts, it may be added, against most of the con- 
trolling measures, in nearly all the trying crises of the federal 



49 

government, northeastern clamor and commotion have proved 
abortive ; and in none more than in the late paroxysm of elec- 
tioneering abolition. 

When those noble forecasting republicans, John and Samuel 
Adams, under the shade of the old English elms, in what came to 
be called Independence Square at Philadelphia, laid their wise 
heads and resolute hearts together, in confidential communion 
as to who would be the fittest person for the continental Con- 
gress to put at the head of the American army before Boston, 
setting aside their own major-general Ward, with several other 
military men of reputation, in a spirit of the most judicious 
nationality of patriotism they pitched on a Virginia slave-holder, 
destined, if all the world were to cast a vote as to who was the 
greatest man of his era, to be unanimously so nominated. Wash- 
ington accordingly repaired to the station assigned to him by 
Congress; and not long after in a letter from "New York, dated 
May, 1776, to the sarcastic general Charles Lee, was betrayed by 
what he experienced of sectional dissatisfaction at his selection 
into perhaps the only sarcastic confidence that ever exuded from 
the pen of one so pre-eminently continental, national, considerate, 
and just. 

This letter is so remarkable for the national ardor of him, 
afterwards commonly designated by reason of his gravity, dignity, 
and almost extreme reserve, the father of his country, that the 
present generation may be enlightened as well as entertained by 
the whole of the sarcastic paragraph. Beginning with the un- 
usual familiarity of " My dear Lee," and closing with "your most 
affectionate," he pours out his burning reprobation of the dis- 
comfited English, and the fugitive Tories, for trying to deprive 
mankind of their inherent rights and privileges, whether, as he 
writes, made in the east, west, north, or south, and rejoices in 
the punishment by sufferings and distress of Tories as parricides. 

Flushed with triumph, fierce with patriotic hatred of foes, as 
much the Boston traitors as the defeated Britons, the new com- 
mander-in-chief thus vents his hearty contempt on two of the 
Massachusetts military, who, by Washington's selection for com- 
mand, were deprived of place and pay : General Ward, whose son 
represented Boston in Congress when I was there, during the war 
of 1812, and General Fry. 

"General Ward, upon the evacuation of Boston, and finding 
4 



50 

there was a probability of his removing from the smoke of his 
own chimney, applied to me, and wrote to Congress for leave to 
resign. A few days afterwards, some of the officers, as he Bays, 
getting uneasy at the prospect of his leaving them, he applied for 
his letter of resignation, which had been committed to my care; 
but, behold! it had been carefully forwarded to Congress, and, as 
I have since learned, judged so reasonable {want of health being 
the plea), that it was instantly complied with. Brigadier Fry, 
previous to this, also conceiving that there was nothing entertain- 
ing or profitable to an old man, to be marching and counter- 
marching, desired, immediately on the evacuation of Boston, 
(which happened on the 17th of March) that he might resign his 
commission on the ll(h of April: the choice of the day became a 
matter of great speculation, and remained profoundly mysterious 
till he exhibited his account, when there appeared neither more 
OT less in it, than the completion of three calendar months; the 
pay of which he received without any kind of compunction, 
although he had never done one tour of duty, or, I believe, had 
ever been out of his house from the time he entered till he quitted 
Cambridge." 

The Declaration of Independence being moved for by Richard 
Henrv Lee, another Virginian slave-holder, a third was appointed 
to draft it; Virginia having, as well as North Carolina, declare \ 
it before Congress was called upon to do so likewise. Of the 
select committee appointed for that solemn rejection of metropo- 
litan sway, and appeal to the sympathetic good-will of mankind, 
the four older and all northern members, Franklin, Sherman, 
Livingston, and Adams, thought proper to devolve the duty on 
their junior, the slave-holder abolitionist, Jefferson. 

Mention has been already made of the Federal convention, 
which, after liberty and independence were achieved in America, 
mid acknowledged by Europe, assembled under slave-holding 
actuation to form more perfect union. In the edification of that 
considered the most perfect structure ever raised of durable 
representative government, it is known to all that Madison and 
Charles Pinckney, were principal architects, with Washington and 
his fellow-soldier Cotesworth Pinckney, eminent contributors, be- 
side many others— all slave-holders— and Madison the scribe, as 
well as perhaps master workman. That constitution, erroneously 
said by abolitionists to have compromised with slavery, was all 



51 

compromise; but much, less with slavery than with militia, cur- 
rency, judiciarv, demarcation between federal supremacy and State 
sovereignty, organizing the Senate as a secret conclave, without au- 
ditory, insensible to popular animadversion, representing no people, 
but merely sovereign States (on which forgotten subject I hope to 
incorporate with history some historical revelations), many other 
difficulties were adjusted. The north claimed navigation, com- 
merce, and manufactures, with all their futurity of inscrutable ex- 
tensions, tariffs to grind plantations with prohibitory imposts, 
drawbacks, fisheries, embargoes, navies, wars, illimitable pension 
lists, great sores as the great seaports have undeniably proved, 
with profuse protective expenditures and other public plunder, of 
which the farming and planting interest, which is the basis of all, 
have had little share. 

The south were allowed their heritage of slavery without hesi- 
tation, in equivalent for the northeastern requirement of pro- 
longed lease in slave trade. Checks and balances were elementaiy 
throughout the whole constitution, securing minorities from the 
despotism of overreaching majorities or sectional demagogues. 
State sovereignty, in addition to strong express reservation, was 
moreover impregnably entrenched behind slave-holding Delaware 
and slave-trading Ehode Island, with their respective handfuls of 
freemen to counterpoise, in case of need, Virginia or Pennsylvania. 

Liberty, with slavery, was the common heritage of all in co- 
partnery, and the only question was, how much it should be ex- 
tended beyond English or antique freedom. The slave-holders 
were for intrusting the largest scope of it with a sovereign people, 
and keeping for government as little as possible. Wise and patri- 
otic statesmen of the north and east objected that such racy un- 
tried democracy might prove anarchical, and preferred a modifi- 
cation of British institutions. Which was right is a question I do 
not enter upon in this mere statement of politics, presented just 
as slavery is by the same statement, not to ascertain whether either 
slavery or politics are right or wrong, but as American realities 
recorded by history. Certain it is that in the organization of 
government and in its first administration, the slave-holders tried 
and trusted political liberty most, and were opposed in that trial 
and trust by the northern predecessors of the present extremest 
abolitionists. It is needless and would be irksome to enumerate 
nominatim the prevalent and prominent slave-holders employed in 



52 

organizing and administering the government with, if not by which 
these United States have outstripped all contemporaneous national 
competition in the career of progressive prosperity and peaceful 
power. President "Washington took for his administration two 
slave-holders of its four members, and both the foreign ministers 
he commissioned to England, France and Spain were slave-holders. 
President John Adams composed the two special missions he sent 
to make peace with France of each two slave-holders to one east- 
ern gentleman. 

But these, it may be repeated, are superfluous enumerations. 
The truly glorious historical and philosophical fact is that in 
advancing to grandeur and national happiness such as no other 
nation has done in the last fifty years, much abused slave-holders 
have been largely instrumental by conducting this country safely 
and triumphantly through every trial of war and many crises of 
peace, to a pitch of renowned eminence formidable and enviable 
throughout the world. Of these fifty years four only have been 
waged in war — two wars at long intervals apart, both undeniably 
just, both waged for peace, and conquering it. During the whole 
fifty years one and the same uniform system of polity, abroad and 
at home, has been maintained with entire consistency of adminis- 
tration and object, and with as entire success. Its only alarming 
interruption is by that baneful and malignant spirit whose venom- 
ous infatuation urges internecine civic hostilities by one portion 
of the same people against another, originated and inflamed by 
foreign fanatical suggestion, warfare much more dangerous than 
irruption by fleets and armies, domineering and the only hinder- 
ance of prodigious progress. 

During these fifty years of American stability and uniformity of 
governmental system, all Europe has been frequently convulsed 
by destructive hostilities, and nearly every nation inconstant in 
its polity. Emperors, kings, queens, and reigning princes have 
been forcibly dethroned. No nation has, if it can, paid its debts. 
Several are bankrupt. Nearly all southwestern Europe has 
adopted in some measure the American representative system of 
government. The least frequent and violent in change of system 
is that kindred people saved from revolution by American politi- 
cal improvements. Such are the works of this slave-holding 
republic. 

Still discontent and malevolence, envy, hatred and malice have 



53 

during nearly all these fifty years of almost fabulous prosperity 
continually festered in and about the educated, highly intelligent 
and refined metropolis of the sagacious and peculiar population 
of New England. Receiving from the federal government more 
than full share of its honors and emoluments, enjoying by means 
of southern slavery at least as large if not larger portion of 
national benefits than auy other part of the United States, still 
hatred to their southern benefactors, disaffection to their federal 
government, incalculable disadvantage and suicidal injustice and 
injury to themselves, have become morose and morbific distem- 
pers. Whether organic or not, it is certain that by proof of a 
Massachusetts President of the United States, John Quincy 
Adams, a gentleman of as much conscientious truth as is com- 
patible with strong passions and prejudices, but by him indelibly 
stamped on the records and history of his country, by the testi- 
mony as unimpeachable and irrefutable of a Massachusetts judge of 
the Supreme Court of the United States, Joseph Story, registered 
by his son's credible biography of a distinguished parent, toge- 
ther with the confession as vouched by Mr. Adams of a Senator 
of the United States and Governor of New Hampshire, William 
Plumer, a scheme to dismember the Union, and erect a north- 
eastern confederacy excluding the southwestern States, was plotted 
in Massachusetts, chiefly in Boston, permanent head-quarters of 
burning disaffection and commotion, has fermented ever since, 
more than once been attempted, first in 1809 with British co-ope- 
ration, again by the Hartford Convention in 1814. Southern 
slave-holders by discomfiting British endeavors to conquer Louis- 
iana from the United States, with the patriotic nationality of the 
common people of New England, veiled the treacherous design 
with despicable amnesty and nebulous oblivion. 

That leaven infused by malcontent and recalcitrant politicians 
and partisan priests, never corrupted all the whole lump ; for those 
John Adams in his well-known work on the English constitution 
termed common people have always been the better people of 
Massachusetts ; much more national and patriotic than their self- 
styled betters, the outside or upper populace, who, like French 
red proletariat and Neapolitan lazzaroni, subsist by commo- 
tion, excitement, and disorder. Western extension before the 
acquisition of Louisiana, southwestern federative ascendency 
since then, with originally some faint objection to slavery, were 



54 

all for the most part mere pretexts for insistence on the I 
portion of public place and official patronage, held northeast till 
[ginning of this century, soon after which self-destruction or 
paralysis of the northeastern side of the old federal party, brought 
on agonies of complaint and imaginary distress. There is extant 
an unpublished letter written by that still vigorous patriarch of 
Massachusetts, John Adams, describing his Boston neighbors as 
so ravenous for prey, that if all the public places were besl 
on them, cormorants there would still crave more. The late 
Judge Woodbury held a similar opinion "1' them. Southern 
slavery, when England gave the cry, was the best imaginable 
object on which to fasten concentrated intolerant persecution, 
reverberating English howl with intensified gall and rampancy. 
Slavery long regretted by numbers of those bred to it, and always 
an equivocal tenure, was stunned by blows at what was more 
easily assaulted and condemned than defended or justified. Out- 
lawed by England as heinous crime, its abolition was proclaimed 
abroad as consummation, hailed east and apprehended south in 
the United States, as condign destruction of American false and 
base independence. Sharing and aggravating the guilt of equally 
odious and incomprehensible democracy, the twin monsters were 
sentenced as malefactors to be gibbeted together; and the peculiar 
people of Anglo-Saxon race, who enjoy dismal more than lively 
spectacles, delighted to attend and applaud the execution of the 
one, some of them preferring abolition even to the other. 

For of the Massachusetts population those John Adams might 
have designated as common people, seem to be quite uncommon. 
With never-failing plebeian patriotism pervading an excellent 
mass, there is an educated populace outside of the multitude 
whose enjoyments are continual disturbance, clamorous agitation, 
pestilential disloyalty, and abominable infidelity. The multitude 
justly, perhaps excessively proud of Plymouth Rock, feel how- 
ever that another rock, that of federal union, is the rock of their 
secular salvation, to which they must cling in spite of incessant 
endeavors of the more flagitious educated to detach them from 
that saving rock ami cast them away on the barren rock <A' Ply- 
mouth. Leaders too much educated lor manual labor and undis- 
tinguished thrift, by stress of brains without exercise of sinews, 
alarmingly indicate that the boasted system of common schools 
may till communities with men and women more worldly than 



55 

virtuous. Incompatibility of creeds, excluding from public schools 
religious culture of the heart, renders the will uncharitable, head- 
strong, and rapacious. Such tuition from the first step astray leads 
the pupil at last to intractable defiance of whatever contravenes 
intolerance of toleration and permanent revolt against authority. 
Those invested by Christianity and society with the holy privi- 
leges of church and sex, proclaim disdain of their mellowing in- 
fluences, preferring demoniac revels of brawling faction and dis- 
gusting licentiousness. Such is not the genius of the plebeian 
northeast ; but the domestic despotism which the restive upper 
populacy impute to fellow count^nuen as the genius of south- 
western slavery, engenders between the two extremes acrimo- 
nious hostility, to which even foreign nations at war with each 
other are strangers. The good common people of New England 
love their whole country more than those more educated who 
claim and ought to be their betters. The honest mass deeply 
feel the vital necessity of union, of all the American people and 
States, while the higher populace, whose progenitors hanged 
Quakers and whipped women, would put Webster, Choate, and 
AVinthrop to death as unpardonable recusants. 

It is necessary to have been as member of Congress from a 
central State, one of a supposed democratic committee in order 
to appreciate the reign of terror with which a small minority 
of indefatigably fanatical abolitionists overrode much of the 
north, like Marat and St. Just in the French Jacobin clubs, re- 
ducing a great affrighted majority to the utmost mortification 
of abject submission. Deprecated associations of habitual party, 
with its salutary fraternal nationality north and south, quailed 
under the lash of unmerciful castigation: driving the widest anta- 
gonisms into monstrous fusion, as that unrelenting domination has 
done in its grand climacter during the late presidential election. 
Territories such as Texas, now with slavery, the richest, most 
tranquil, if not improving of any State in the Union, were repelled 
with preposterous malediction. The whole coequal south was 
debarred from California, appropriation bills fettered with absurd 
short-lived provisos, the entire legislation of Congress under the 
despotism of cabalistic countersign which it was northeastern 
political death to disregard — such was the reign of terror which 
prefaced disunion. Legions of abolitionists, free-soilers, free-toil- 
ers, and other adventurers, like the Vandals who overran South- 



56 

em Europe, rallied to subjugate the Southern States. New- 
crusaders, English and North American, French and German, 
Suabian, Swedish, descendants of Goths, and some Asiatics, 
were to rush on African slavery in America, and drive fifteen 
States under the Caudine forks. Failing to enlist the centre, the 
north palters in their crusade, of which the blasting after-thought 
must have been to subjugate masters and liberate slaves. Other- 
wise there is no logic in their abolition. To concede legality and 
intangibility to slavery in fifteen States, merely resisting its diffu- 
sion, abandons all morality of objection, together with all the 
political virtue of abolition, leaving in the right only those few 
conscientious but passive protestants against slavery, who never 
resist by force, and those few madmen who forcibly resist their 
country, the constitution, and the Bible. Root-and-branch aboli- 
tionists, who insist on the extermination of slavery as not merely 
malum prohibitum but malum in se, offence against God and griev- 
ous sin by man, according to the testimonials of the late presiden- 
tial election, are all that are left, the insignificant remnant of sin- 
cere and honest passive or demoniac abolition. 

To which class does that senator belong whose personal dis- 
tress has attracted national sympathy ? Not only an educated but 
a travelled gentleman, has his invective been barbed with more 
than Boston poignancy? Apparently merged in horrors of slavery, 
his senatorial station, like that of British commissioner in Cuba, 
is exclusively devoted to superintend, expose, and resist its abom- 
inations. Not content with that senatorial service, irresponsible 
aspersions of other senators and habitual traducement of States 
inflame his discourse. History abounds with narratives of the 
great effect which often comes of little causes. The subjugating 
condescension of splendid English hospitalities seduces many 
young Americans from their country. A senator's portrait hangs 
in the hall of an English castle, the seat of noble landlords, where 
the American Cassandra was welcomed for fabulous denigration 
of her country. Such castles receive their delighted guests, like 
Hannibal at Capua. American love of English lords is easily 
converted by them into their love of American negroes, and 
transplanted from English noble mansions to American sea- 
ports flourishes with unpatriotic, but irresistible gratitude for 
social honors received abroad. Disorderly and unprovoked per- 
sonalities in debate, challenging still more disorderly retaliation, 



57 

might be witty requital for such favors. If that defied retalia- 
tion convulsed the whole United States from Atlantic to Pacific, 
threatened their dismemberment, and helped the candidate of 
abolition to the Presidency, a debt of gratitude was paid with 
compound interest. Cassandra begirdled with serpents may 
change the scene of her next legend from cotton fields and dis- 
mal swamps to the capitol at Washington. 

England neither old or new, nor together, have yet unveiled all 
the msyteries and miracles of negro slavery in America ; much 
more to be feared than its bitterest modern detractors have told 
or imagined. The most philosophical and suggestive of British 
statesmen, remonstrating with Great Britain when as implacably 
hostile to American liberty as now to American slavery, extolled 
it as noble haughtiness of domination, which all history teaches 
combines with and fortifies love of freedom in masters of slaves, 
and renders it in them indomitable. If Burke had lived till now 
he would have recognized more striking American, than all the 
ancient exemplification of that historical truth by which he vin- 
dicated this country. Northern suburban tumultuary crowds, 
custom-house combinations, partisan meetings, riflemen pastors, 
female sharp shooters, the local seldom pervading press, with all 
the other means of abolition a thousand miles off if American, 
and three thousand if foreign, have little effect on distant se- 
questered slavery. Property is an overmatch for sentimental- 
ity. Slave-masters in the instructive solitude of rurality, whose 
haughty independence, according to Macon's quaint illustration, 
is hardly disturbed by barks of a neighbor's dog, meditates self- 
preservation from distant but constant foes of their possessions, 
and instigators of their household to revolt. Life and fortune 
always at stake, beset by such assailants, tax man's spirit for 
its utmost resources. Pastors preach, and females wail destruc- 
tion, in reckless abortion of remote abolition, only warning 
sequestered slavery to sharpen the wits and stiffen the sinews 
of incensed masters. Constrained by the intemperance of abo- 
lition to exclude or extinguish its firebrands, they are not 
often available among the slaves ; and their distributors seldom 
seek the glory or influence of martyrdom. Exhorting only 
where there are no slaves, they rarely venture like most great 
reformers to brave insult, imprisonment or death itself for their 



58 

can.-'. Thus northern, distant and foreign abolition begets its 
own discomfiture, and that slave-holding imperturbable ascend- 
eucv, of which its abortive assailants never cease complaints, 
reproaches and vain endeavors to overcome. Slavery's only di- 
minution, abolition's only success will begin when abolition c 
to be extraneous pressure. Till then, northeastern complaint is 
neither as wise or as pungent as it might be. For it is not a mi- 
nority of fifteen States with eight millions of people which have 
controlled a majority of sixteen States with fourteen millions of 
people. But less than three hundred thousand masters of slaves 
actuate eight millions of people, as if one man on all subj 
which slavery is the chief object, by that absorbing and resistless 
lever regulating the politics of other fourteen millions of people 
in sixteen States; to none of whom slavery is acceptable, to 
many offensive, and to some intolerably detestable. There 
must be magic in the web of such a faculty, for government, 
federal as well as State, for founding republics and shaping their 
polity, for resisting foreign assaults, and preserving domestic tran- 
quillity. Confederated disaffection may alienate, embroil, perhaps 
embattle United States. But southern love of liberty with 
slavery, even if driven to the xerge of disunion, or over it. will 
only more effectually disappoint northern interference with the 
possessions and predilections of proud and dominant masters. Ab- 
olition south can never begin by extrinsic and insulting pressure 
north, nor can it be ever extended further from north to south, 
unless enacted as by the Pennsylvania law of 1780, not only con- 
fining its operations to the State enacting it, but scrupulously 
securing the slave property of all other States where it exists. 

Nothing in American politics, compared with those of the old 
world, lias been more surprising abroad, or impressive at home, 
than that principle of resignation engrafted by Washington's ex- 
ample on the federal constitution, by which a chief-magistrate re- 
signs his great powers, and retires unpensioned to private life, after 
laudable love of public esteem has been gratified by re-election. 
Of that esteem it is significant of public sentiment, that the only 
eted presidents were slave-holders; all living toadvanced age 
— all but Washington far beyond the usual term of longevity- 
each with a long interval between active life and meditative seclu- 
sion from it. Studious of this world's good-will, but much more 



59 

of everlasting immortality, those illustrious objects of American 
veneration lived and died all slave-holders. Washington, who, 
during his presidency, wrote to Sinclair that slavery was receding 
from Pennsylvania, and probably would in Virginia, by will, 
several j^ears afterwards, freed his slaves, after his own death and 
that of his widow, but without assigning any reason for it. Though 
Cartwright, an early English Eadical, had then published a letter to 
Washington, predicating the common English confusion of black 
and white in the right of men to liberty, and accusing Washing- 
ton of imputed inconsistency in maintaining freedom and holding 
slaves; yet abolition was then so faint a cry that Washington 
hardly heard of it. Jefferson's enthusiastic zeal for it gave way 
at its American alarming increase, manifested by the Missouri 
controversy. Madison, finding his slaves unprofitable, directed 
by his last will that they should be sold. I am not aware that 
Monroe made any remarkable disposition as to his. Jackson 
expired consoling slaves weeping at his bedside. 

Four, if not all five of those slave-holding chief-magistrates, 
were founders or the boldest reformers of republican institutions ; 
all of them inaugurators of their most democratic experiments. 
From consideration of their influence on the American mission 
of political regeneration, if such it be, to the northeastern, particu- 
larly the Massachusetts presidents, the conclusion must be that 
New England, with many indisputable merits, is not the region, 
of political founders or reformers. By selection and rejection, 
the Adamses, father and son, seem to indicate American prefer- 
ence for slave-holding founders and rulers. John Adams, admi- 
rable in Congress, foreign missions, everywhere in public service 
except as president, failed totally as such ; could not control his 
own party or keep it together ; plunged the country into inextri- 
cable difficulties, and was completely depopularized when striving 
for re-election. Reproaching Jefferson with supplanting him, "I 
had little or nothing to do with it," said Jefferson; "I was but 
the rallying point of those who preferred another system to yours." 
His son, John Quincy Adams, with such training abroad and at 
home as no other American statesman ever enjoyed, more public 
places and opportunities, with superior attainments and experi- 
ence, ardent patriotism withal, admirable as Secretary to a plain, 
practical, slave-holding statesman, President Monroe, without a 



tithe of the Secretary's learning and accomplishments, was as 
president, notwithstanding so superior a* colaborer as Mr. Clay, 
extremely unacceptable, scholastic, fantastic, vapid, jejune, and 
unapt for rule. The fate of both those New England presidents 
was to show that, with many talents, they had none of the special 
capacity by wisdom required, more than learning, for governing 
a republic. 

Descending from those northeastern demigods, to the last 
in some respects, perhaps, most celebrated of their heroic civi- 
lians, upon whose panegyric statues and pictures are multiplied, 
over whose recent grave clouds of local, mixed with some small 
infusion of transatlantic incense fumes, Mr. Webster, as orator 
scarcely equalled, as logician admirable, as lawyer leading, as 
senator controlling, even as wit, attractive, and altogether emi- 
nent, constrained to sacrifice State popularity for national influ- 
ence, the giant in speech dwindled in action. His whole 
apprenticeship as Secretary of State for the presidency was a 
sequence of total failures. Surrendering his country north in 
McLeod's case, and south in that of the Creole, both capitulations 
were reversed by umpirage among the very fogs of Threadneedle 
Street. Surrendering the American sea palladium, it was restored 
to the United States by all the great powers of Europe in Congress, 
by Treaty of Paris ; surrendering one-third of old Massachusetts 
for a British military road ; crouching before the Hungarian 
adventurer, Avith seaports, abolitionists and Senates, till the idol 
was overthrown by slave-holding iconoclasts, Secretary Webster's 
final failure was by perilous misprision of the guano job, near 
plunging the United States into war. 

Constant experience that the slave-holding south supplies rulers 
most acceptable to the north has induced its successive preference 
of Cotesworth Pinckney, Henry Clay, William Henry Harrison, 
John Tyler, Zachary Taylor, Winfield Scott, and John Charles Fre- 
mont, all from the south, and several of them slave-holders, as the 
northern choice for presidents. As northeastern sectional antipathy 
to slavery increases, so does its preference for slave-bred rulers, 
until at last those whose flaming rubric is anathema of slavery 
and its supporters, rejecting a proffered northern candidate of 
unquestionable eminence, rallied to a neophyte whose birth, 
education, and innate sympathies rose from his mother earth, irre- 



61 

sistible refutal of northern champions shouting to the centre to 
join in odious denigration of their leader's birth-place, and un- 
natural hostilities against his kindred and associations. 

In such warfare no place was left for neutrality, dubiety, or 
hypocrisy. Free-soil, free-toil, and all other counterfeits, auxili- 
aries of abolition, were compelled to take side. Henceforth 
British and American coalition against American slavery, deserted 
by all who coincide in its constitutional legality, is reduced to 
ignoble and hopeless controversy with squatter sovereignty. 

Eevelation of an eleventh commandment so recently discover- 
ed against African slavery in America was not made public till 
long after my impressions concerning it were settled. The first 
time I heard of it, then but faintly and most disastrously objected 
to this country, was by the Hartford Convention. With prepos- 
sessions of two centuries of New England lineage, and much of 
them from clergymen forefathers there, birth and residence in 
Pennsylvania, I trust, centralized my love of country. At col- 
lege and in Congress early associations had no tendency to pre- 
judice me against slave-holders. While still young, impressionable, 
and imitative, it was my fortune to be associated, at one or the 
other of these normal schools, and in many instances at both, 
with William H. Crawford, George Troup, and John Forsyth, of 
Georgia; Joseph Alston and his brothers, Daniel Huger, Thomas 
Pinckney, John Middleton, William Lowndes, John C. Calhoun, 
and Langdon Cheves, of South Carolina; William Gaston, Na- 
thaniel Macon, Frederick Nash, William K. King, and Joseph 
Pearson, of North Carolina; James Madison, James Monroe, 
Charles Fenton Mercer, James Pleasants, John W. Eppes, and 
George Washington Parke Custis, of Virginia; Henry Clay, in 
all the brilliant ascendant of his commanding nature, besides 
many other slave-holders, not only by talents, but patriotism, recti- 
tude, purity of morals, and amenity of intercourse, without insti- 
tuting such odious comparisons as are lately too common, certainly 
the equal of others, fellow-countrymen, wherever born or bred. 
Slavery had not deteriorated, nor its institution degraded them. 
They had incurred no sentence of exclusion from the Union, its 
politics, society, churches or honors. Early impression of their 
worth has been forced by abolition to conviction that the commu- 
nities represented by such citizens in the American United States 



011 899 513 2 



62 



are much more sinned against than sinning by slavery. That 
such abolition is much greater evil than such slavery, is the sole 
motive of this imperfect endeavor to vindicate, not them, but 
our common country from detraction by foreign prejudice, and 
worse than foreign enmity. 

C. J. IXGERSOLL. 

Forest Hill, Philadelphia, 
November, 185G. 



